Eric Flint - Pyramid Power

"I told them not to," said Ella from above.

"Honey," said Liz. "Why don't you join us too? You were absolutely brilliant." She was hugging a bemused but smiling Jerry Lukacs. "I'm never letting you out of my sight for one instant, ever again. You've got so thin, love."

"It's… been a bit of a rough journey." He squinted at her. "And the last time I saw you, you were busy kissing someone else."

Liz blushed. "It wasn't what it looked like. And I think you saved me from getting raped."

"She went there to look for you, Jerry," said Lamont, "without realizing that Valkyries are the Norse equivalent of boom-boom girls. She was acting the part and trying to get her partner blind drunk. So don't make a fuss about it, because she's been tearing herself apart to think how she's going explain it to you."

Jerry blinked. "She doesn't have to explain anything."

"But I want to," said Liz. "First, though, we need to get you out of here, get you dry, fed, and your hands untied."

She looked as if she was about to start crying any moment, with the chin definitely quivering slightly, which was not something you expected from Liz. She also looked as if she was going to devour him with her eyes.

"Sounds good," said Jerry. "Especially the fed part. I've eaten half a magic apple, thirty-six nuts, four bird eggs, and a bowl of gruel in the last nine days. Does anyone know what has become of Loki and Sigyn, by the way?"

"He took the Norns back off to Urd's well. Sigyn went along to keep an eye on Skuld," said Lamont.

"Skuld-uggery! She wanted to make sure he Urd on the side of caution," said Jerry. And then gaped as Liz, instead of groaning, burst into a flood of tears and hugged him fiercely.

"It wasn't that bad," he said warily, once he could breathe again.

"It was bloody awful," she said, smiling through the tears. "But it's so very you."

"Are you absorbing wisdom through the skin?" asked Thor from the edge of the water. "What did you do to Odin? He and his troops are still galloping their horses away from this place."

"That," said Ella, with a scowl, "was my little brother. He's a menace."

"I thought it was way cool," said Tolly admiringly. "Especially the part about the drowned woman. How did you find out all this neat stuff?"

Agent Stephens watched the black bird warily. It did have a large beak. It also had a roll of parchment around one leg. "The message is for you," said the bird. "I could peck it off, but it probably would be illegible. I was told to tell you Tom Harkness sent me."

Agent Stephens had had a hard time in the last while, reconciling himself with the fact that his entire purpose in life was now something he had to reassess, in the light of being somewhere where the U.S. was not even a concept, and from where he had no chance of return or even of fulfilling his mission. He and Bott had tagged along with the party of moderns simply because they did not know where else to go. Preparation and briefing for the Harkness mission had of necessity been scanty. And then not only had they lost their guides, their destination and their way home, they'd also lost their mission… or so he'd believed.

Now, unless someone was deceiving them, he had to reassess again. With trembling fingers he undid the little scroll. What he saw there was enough to convince him that Tom Harkness was still alive-and in this Mythworld, the Norse one, not still stranded in the Greek Mythworld.

He was filled with righteous indignation. How dare these people mislead him like that? Not only had this Liz, Lamont and these children wrecked the mission, and destroyed his way home, they'd also deceived him about his mission objective.

"I have a message for you from Harkness," the raven continued. "The Americans you are associating with are known collaborators and sympathizers with unfriendly foreign powers. We need you to act as our eyes and ears in their midst."

Eric Flint Dave Freer

Pyramid Power

"So now we need to know what you plan, Jerry," said Loki, once they returned to Ran's cliff dwelling. "After all, you have now received two of the perceived sources of wisdom in the Norse world. You should be, if not a match for Odin, at least able to see through some of his strategies."

"Yes," rumbled Thor. "I've heard Loki's side of the story. There is some truth in what he says. Actually, to be fair, everything I've looked closely at proved to be true. Not polite, but true. Odin bespelled Loki and Sigyn's son Vali-a blameless boy-and thereby killed their son Narfi. That calls for a blood-price. Loki has put that price as Odin's own life. Many of us, myself among them, played a part in Loki's capture. Odin, Heimdall and Skadi imprisoned Loki for what Odin told us was for the benefit of all. Odin was always too good at talking us into doing things for his benefit."

Loki snorted. "And he was very good at telling us we would not understand his reasons for doing them, because they were high matters which only he could understand."

"It's always a mistake to hand over too much thinking to someone else," said Liz. She nudged Thrud. "Especially men."

Thor's daughter giggled.

Jerry rubbed his brow. "Wisdom is maybe the wrong word for what I've acquired. Or rather maybe it is the right word, but we understand it wrongly. We all drank from the well. I didn't mean to, but I swallowed enough."

Lamont held out his hands. "And I can't say it gave me any insights into how to treat Marie's cancer or that it made Tolly and Ty any older or wiser."

"If I have my geography right, Mirmir's well is one of the deepest places in this Ur-universe. You've got to understand the symbolism here. The water in Mirmir's well has passed through every place in this world, filtering ever downwards. By the laws of contagion it's therefore still part of all the things it has passed through. You were drinking in the land… I suspect you would find it very hard to get lost, or starve now. You wouldn't know precisely how you knew, but you'd know."

"Great. Really useful," said Lamont. "Especially to someone wanting to find his wife, and cure her. Not to mention organizing a great apocalyptic battle."

Jerry raised an eyebrow. "If you think about it, Lamont, it at least would help you find her. And to a general it should be priceless."

"But how does it help us to capture Odin? We should have struck when he was at Mirmir's well," said Thor, cheerfully ignoring the fact that they had been vastly outnumbered.

Counting, Jerry suspected, was not one of Thor's strengths. Or perhaps his strength lay in the fact that he didn't count, before he got into a fight.

Jerry tugged his straggly little goatee-beard. "I need to think about it. Asgard's defenses are designed to keep out frost and mountain giants. If I recall rightly, it is the flood caused by Jormungand and the fire caused by Surt that destroys the world at Ragnarok."

"Surt and the sons of Muspell did figure in my plans," admitted Loki. "An alliance of convenience against a common enemy, as it were."

"A mistake," rumbled Thor. "We've got a sort of common background with the frost and mountain giants. We've married them, had them live amongst us, like Loki, been friends with some like?gir, and Grid, fought with them, wandered their lands. We share much of the same opinions and attitudes. The South and East are closed lands. Muspell and Surt's dominions have an ancient enmity with the Vanir, but no common blood or traditions."

Jerry was surprised by the perspicacity of Thor's analysis. "Yes, culture," he said knowledgeably. "You know why Americans stir the honey into their tea clockwise, and South Africans like Liz, do so counterclockwise?"

"What is clockwise?" asked Thor.

Jerry demonstrated with a twirling finger. "Like this. Counterclockwise is like that."