Eric Flint - Pyramid Power

"That's the least of your worries right now," Jerry grunted, helping him up. They followed the watercourse down. It ended in a short cliff-the sort of thing Jerry might have been able to climb alone, but the injured man wasn't going to manage.

"Sit here." said Jerry. "Let me look around."

Unencumbered, he was able to move easier and faster. Just over a small ridge he spotted a structure made of huge slabs of stone, chinked with mosses. There was a hole-window and Jerry managed to get up to the sill and look in.

Inside, the large, fat, red-bearded man snored and bubbled from the floor. Beside him was the room's only piece of furniture, an enormous stone chair. The room wasn't the ideal place to find shelter, but the air coming out was quite warm. And it would give him a chance to try to find the others. So Jerry went back and helped the PSA agent up and over to the hole-window.

They had to approach the sill along a path that wasn't wide enough for two men. The sill was shoulder high. It all made for a somewhat epic and monumental effort, but Jerry got the man into the room.

He was just helping him off the sill when someone spoke. "Well, well, look what the cat dragged in. Einherjar!"

Jerry turned to find himself being grabbed by the man with the loose beard and the iron gauntlets and girdle who had been talking to Odin. The hands in those gauntlets were enormously, crushingly strong. But their attacker only had two arms-and two people to hold. Back at grade school Jerry had only once ever hit someone. The class bully had poured milk-Jerry's milk-onto the book Jerry had been reading. Jerry had been quite accustomed to being the butt of various jokes and pranks. He usually just read on and ignored them. He was not that attached to milk anyway. But one didn't mistreat books like that. He'd punched the bully in the eye, a reaction so out of character and unexpected that the kid had backed off, despite being twice his size, and despite it being a totally ineffectual, feeble blow.

Jerry tried it again. Like the last time he hit the offender in the eye. Like last time he also hurt his hand, but the physical exercise he'd been forced into by the Greek myth adventure paid dividends. The man who had grabbed them with those incredibly strong hands did not quite let go, but he staggered back, to fall into the stone chair. The chair began to rise slowly from the floor on the backs of two enormous women who had apparently been hiding under its legs, in a hollow there. They'd been covered with a blanket, sprinkled with floor-filth, to make it invisible.

"Damn it!" cursed the man with iron gauntlets. "Not me!"

He let go of Jerry, just as Jerry took another swing at him, and pulled the iron rod from his belt. It grew as he held it and pushed the chair back down, with the two gigantic women yowling. Jerry took this opportunity to get away. He fell over the still-snoring Red-beard, who, for his part, muttered and rolled over-sending Jerry staggering to the door and into the arms of some burly Norsemen, backed up by the one-eyed one.

Whatever One-eye said in his foreign tongue, it did stop them from killing him.

It didn't stop them being tied up like Christmas turkeys, though, both him and the PSA agent with the injured foot. The corpulent red-bearded man slept through all of it, even fake-beard kicking him and shouting at him, and Odin rebuking him for it. Jerry would have liked to ask him why he spoke English but the gag was fairly effective, and very dirty.

A few minutes later, with one less shoe than he'd had earlier and half the sleeve torn off his windbreaker, Jerry found himself being carried outside and bundled onto a cart, and left there, under guard, next to a moaning but barely conscious PSA agent. The guy had at least tried to fight. Kicking someone with that foot probably came under the heading of less than clever though.

Distantly, Jerry could hear the sounds of mayhem and search continuing.

Eric Flint Dave Freer

Pyramid Power

"Jerry! Jerry!" screamed Liz, watching in horror from the crumbling edge as the rod in the gauntleted man's hands had grown, widening and raising the stone slab out of the bridge, and crushing it into the vast dim beams.

Lamont pulled her back. "We've got to run, Liz. There are more of those goons coming." He pointed. Sure enough, running along a sort of balustrade-ledge was another group of the Norse warriors she'd tipped off the ladder.

Liz found it hard to care. They'd been through such a lot… and… and… she was just getting know him and love him for all his crazy habits. She was vaguely aware that she was being hustled along, and that Lamont was crying too. Jerry and Lamont had been close friends a lot longer than she'd known him. A now ex-maintenance man was not the most likely of friends for a visiting professor of mythology, but that was Jerry.

She swallowed. That had been Jerry. So blind to ordinary things that he saw right through to the person on the inside. Okay, capable of wearing his pants back to front, but what was that to someone of his quality?

She sniffed angrily. Damn fool! She should have been at the back, not him.

"There are more of them that way," said someone.

"Quick, in through here. There's a staircase."

There was. But it was not designed for humans. The steps were one and a half times too high, forcing Liz to try to concentrate on actual circumstance or tumble headlong down the stairs onto everyone else.

When she got to the bottom, she was in a gloomy cavernous room. Her first thought was that they had strayed into some kind of Norse giant's torture chamber. Then she realized it just smelled that way, and that the implements could just as easily belong in a giant's kitchen. One without much house-pride… or any idea of hygiene. The floor was ankle deep in slushy stuff that she didn't want to think about too much.

There was bellowing from up the stairs. And more, answering bellows coming from outside.

Someone said "psst!" from calf height. Looking down, Liz saw a very black face in the ruddy firelight from the ox-roasting-size open range. It wasn't the sort of black face to inspire any confidence; it had a big warty nose, snaggled teeth, and a lot of black, wild hair. But the owner of the face was beckoning.

"Svart," he said looking at the Jackson family. And then some more Norse that was above Liz's ability to guess.

"What's he saying?"

"I only get one word, but I think he wants you to go in there because you're black," said Liz. "Like him."

"In," said Marie, pushing children forward. "I can't run any more. And he does look as black as the ace of spades. If that gets us help, I'm not too proud to accept it."

The gap was narrow and the space inside, dark. It seemed to be dusty and full of hard lumps of stuff.

"It smells like coal," said someone.

"Hush," said someone else.

Outside, they could hear the clatter of searchers. They waited silently in the utter darkness of a giant coal-cellar.

The wait gave Liz time to reflect and to regret. To cry too, in the darkness. She didn't have very long though, because a little hand found hers. "Come," it whispered. "Mom says."

The tunnel was dark and narrow, and hot. It came out at a river, near a dock beneath the cliff. The broad, cold green-water river was rimmed with ice. The water bobbed with the heads of swimmers, many of whom were as black and furry as their guide. He pointed and dived in.

"Do we swim it, Lamont?" said Emmitt, looking doubtful.

Lamont felt the water. "No way," he said. "It's like Lake Michigan in midwinter. Those guys might be able to swim in this and live, but I don't think we could."

Liz leaned down and felt. Sure enough, it was finger-numbing cold. The bitter wind made it worse when she took her fingers out. "I agree. That's hypothermia material, and you'd be too cold to swim in it. I'm not sure if you'd die of cold or drown first. We'll have to find some other way."