James Lovegrove - The Age Of Odin

"Weren't him."

She was looking towards Backdoor's corpse.

"Weren't him at all."

I thought I'd lost the power of speech.

"Just felt you should know," she said, "seeing as you went to so much trouble fingering the fella and getting him executed and all. You were so certain you had your guy, I really didn't have the heart to tell you you were wrong. 'Sides, it was more fun this way, going along with you, giving you your head like a wild Appaloosa, seeing how far you'd take it. And you took it all the way, Gid. Right as far as you could. My, but you're a cold, hard son of a gun. Anybody gets the wrong side of you, whoa nelly, they better look out! You have no qualms about terminating them with extreme prejudice."

She stroked my cheek.

"And I have to say, I find that kinda attractive. Sexy, even. I can see now what Freya Njorthasdottir sees in you. You're as forthright and ruthless as she is. It's a match made in Gimle."

I managed to stir my lead-weight tongue. "I don't believe you. This is bullshit. You're trying to trick me. It was Backdoor. It fucking was."

"So you've persuaded yourself. But I swear, hand on heart, I never clapped eyes on the man before today. He wasn't lying either when he said the same about me."

"But…"

"It's the most delicious thing watching you squirm like this, like a worm on the hook. It's the gravy on my biscuits. You just put an innocent man through the most obscene, brutal torture imaginable. Not wishing to get all Oprah on you, but how does that make you feel?"

Gutted. Appalled. Shattered.

Livid.

"You — you fucking bitch!" I roared. "You could have said. Any time, you could have said."

"And why would I have done that, when stringing you along meant I could have this moment of exquisite tormenting? Psychological pain can be far harder to bear than physical pain, and far more rewarding to inflict."

I lunged at her, although the ropes made it a useless gesture.

"Now, now, none of that," Mrs Keener chided, wagging a finger. "Don't be getting mad at me . If you should be mad at anyone, it's yourself."

"Who, then?" I said thickly. "Who was it?"

"Don't you know?"

I had an inkling. There was only one person left it could have been. But I'd trusted him. I'd considered him a friend.

"He's right over there." She motioned towards the onlookers. "Looking kinda shifty, it has to be said. No need for that, honey," she called out to him. "Don't have to pretend it ain't you I'm talking to. It's all right. It doesn't matter now if folks know who you are and what you did. You're safe. You're under my protection. In fact, why not come up here and take a bow? You've done good work, far as I'm concerned. You deserve your moment of glory."

The man she was addressing broke free from the crowd, passed through the cordon of frost giants, and made his way, a little sheepishly maybe, up onto the scaffold.

He stood beside Mrs Keener, and she placed a friendly, conspiratorial arm round his broad boxer's shoulders.

"Wotcher, bruv," Cy said to me. "How's it hanging?"

There was a twinkle in Cy's eye as he spoke.

"Yes, I was the one fucking with you, not Backdoor," he said. "It was me. Me, the black guy. Just because someone's black don't mean he's above suspicion. In't we supposed to be colour-blind these days? Positive discrimination's as bad as the negative kind. No reason to think my skin tone makes me whiter than white."

He chortled at his own wit.

"Mrs Keener hired me to be an agitator," he went on. "To be a — how'd you put it, Mrs K?"

"A destabilising influence."

"That's it, a destabilising influence. Just to make her victory that bit more likely. Sow a little uncertainty here, start a little infighting there, classic psy-ops stuff. It wasn't hard to get recruited to Odin's army. No one was exactly vetting us, were they? You turned up, you were in, that was more or less it. Odin was grateful just to have the warm bodies. My job, my real job, once I'd joined up, was to gain someone's confidence, someone influential. Get close to them, then keep them off-balance, off their game."

"If the head's unsteady, the whole body wobbles," said Mrs Keener.

"Me," I croaked. "I was the head."

"Got it in one," said Cy. "I wasn't going to try for Odin himself. Too big a target, and too remote. Hard to get his trust, harder still to manipulate him. So I started on Thor. Kept challenging his authority, antagonising him, pissing him off. Not a painless tactic on my side, but it seemed the way to go… until you came along. Soon as I met you, I knew you were the one. You had that take-charge look about you. You were a newcomer, but you were going places. Plus, we had similar backgrounds, we were on the same wavelength. We had a bond going from the start. You liked me. That made you the perfect mark."

"The perfect chump, more like."

"Same difference. Look, d'you really want me to spell out everything I did, how I made it all work? Because it feels like I'm monologuing here, and I know you've got stuff you'd much rather be getting on with."

I was about to tell him that he could happily shut up because I wasn't interested in hearing anything more that came out of his lying fucking gob.

But then I spotted something out of the corner of my eye.

Movement.

On top of one of the castle turrets.

A figure making stiff, halting progress across the damaged roof up there.

A man, searching for a vantage point, a direct view of the scaffold.

A man with a rifle.

I directed my gaze back on Cy. Kept my expression as straight as I could. Poker face on.

"No, you go right ahead," I said. "Spill it all. I know you're dying to. Explain to everyone how clever you are and how stupid I've been."

Bergelmir gave a growl. "Must we do this? The day's wasting, and I yearn to plunge this blade into the killer of my wife."

"Just a few minutes more," Mrs Keener said to him soothingly. "My boy Cy hoodwinked Gid in fine style, and it's only right he gets his chance to gloat."

"Yeah," Cy agreed. "Why not? So I made myself your right-hand man, Gid. Your sidekick. Robin to your Batman. We had those chats about my childhood and my poor old granddad getting irradiated and losing his memory. Which, by the way, was all true. I might have embellished the tough-upbringing stuff a little, for added authenticity. But the basics is all real."

"You were never in the army, though, were you?"

"Nope, that I did make up," he admitted.

"You referred to your granddad as a squaddie. That should have tipped me off. No one who's actually been a squarebasher uses the word squaddie . Only the tabloids do."

I darted a glance to the castle. The man with the rifle was settling himself down on a flattish section of the roof, taking a sniper's prone stance. Nobody but me appeared to have noticed him. The crowd had their backs to the castle, and their attention, anyway, was focused on the drama unfolding on the scaffold. And everyone on the scaffold had their attention focused on me and Cy.

How long this state of affairs would continue was unclear, but I would try and keep it going long enough for the rifle man to line up his shot and take it.

I knew who he was now. I'd recognised him by the white bandage around his head.

Heimdall.

Risen from his sickbed. Recovered from the injuries inflicted on him from afar by Jormungand . Tooled up and out for blood.

He'd been overlooked. Mrs Keener had presumed he was out of action for the duration and had not bothered to post a guard over the field hospital. She'd been overconfident. It was a lapse, and now she was going to pay the penalty.

"Okay, so I did slip up there," Cy said. "But not too badly, and in every other respect I was flawless. Starting the firefight in Utgard, that was my first big win. Chopsticks died, and your plans for an alliance with the frosties were scuppered."