Kevin Hearne: Hammered

Ratatosk replied, sounding at once embarrassed and proud. He was such an agreeable fellow, and I smiled briefly at the top of his head before frowning at the light. The unavoidable problem of the Norns grew closer with every leap upward. I could not coach Ratatosk out of this; whatever he did, the Norns would foresee it. But now I feared that they truly shared my paranoia and that in their eagerness to attack me—the unseen, uncertain danger on Ratatosk’s back—they would willingly accept collateral damage, wounding both friend and foe. I did not want Ratatosk to come to harm, but neither did I want to have him stop; they would be prepared for such an event. As it stood, he was bringing me directly to them, where they could easily attack me astride the squirrel, flat against the trunk like a target. Bugger it all.

Ratatosk scurried out of the hole in the root and headed down the outside surface, and as soon as I saw the earth perhaps ten feet below, I unbound myself from his fur and leapt off, somersaulting in the air so as to land on my feet. A hoarse shouted curse and a flash of light startled me in midair, then I heard (and felt) Ratatosk scream as I landed, the sting of impact flaring in my ankles and knees. As the squirrel’s cries continued, I dropped and rolled to my right, expecting to be crushed underneath him as he fell from the tree. But that didn’t happen; his voice cut off abruptly, the bond between our minds snapped, and I glanced up to see naught but a flurry of ashes and bone fragments raining down from the place where he’d clung to the World Tree.

My mouth gaped and I think I might have whimpered. The Norns had obliterated him completely—a creature they’d known for centuries—because of me. It was like watching Rudolph get shot by Santa Claus.

Clearly, the Norns must have thought I represented a dire threat to act so rashly. I tore my eyes away from the horror and watched them warily, keeping still to maximize the effect of my camouflage.

They couldn’t see me. Their blazing yellow eyes, smoke curling from the sockets, were still fixed above my head on Ratatosk’s swirling remains. They were stooped hags with clawlike fingers, and their faces bore frenzied expressions that mothers warn their children not to make in case they freeze that way. Dressed in dirty gray rags that matched the greasy strings of hair falling from their scalps, they advanced carefully on the tree to make sure the danger they’d foreseen had passed.

It hadn’t.

It wasn’t long before they vocalized this. One of them tilted her head upon a wattled neck and said, “He is still here. The danger remains.”

Danger to whom? I hadn’t come to throw down with them. I just wanted some extremely rare produce. They all deserved a swift kick in the hoo-hah for what they had done to Ratatosk, but much as I wanted to deliver it, I didn’t see an upside to picking a fight with them when they could vaporize giant rodents. I took a step to my right, an overture to running away, but they must have spied the movement, for their heads all snapped down to lock directly on me with jaundiced, egg-yolk eyes.

“He is there!” the middle one cried, pointing, and then in unison they sang out in a truly ancient language and threw open their hands at me, their dirty fingernails releasing a foul dust into the air.

I didn’t know precisely what the dust was supposed to accomplish; most likely, it was my demise. Perhaps, in their old age and infirmity, they thought they were throwing confetti at me—but their behavior did not seem all that warm and welcoming. Rather the opposite, in fact. My cold iron amulet flashed hot for a second, confirming that they had just tried to kill me, and my stomach twisted oddly in my guts, causing me to fart robustly.

Normally I laugh at such things, because there is nothing like a fart to lighten up a tense situation. But this one hadn’t been a natural result of my digestion; it was a deadly serious fart, a sign that some small fraction of the Norns’ magic was getting past my amulet—perhaps a single speck of that dust—and that worried me.

“He’s still alive!” the one on the right cursed, and that dispelled any lingering doubts about their intentions.

I probably should have run for it. But then, if I escaped, they’d raise the alarm and all of Asgard would be searching for me. That wouldn’t end well. Strategically, logically, and even instinctively, in self-defense, I had to take them out. And once a decision like that is made in a moment of crisis, there is no such thing as calm, reasoned execution. There is only action, fueled by the baser parts of our brains.

The rags on the Norns’ bony frames were natural woolen fibers, and as such, lent themselves to easy manipulation. As the Norns shoved their claws into pockets for more dust and began to chant something different and more dire in their old tongue, I murmured a binding for the material at their shoulder blades, so that when I finished and willed it done, they were abruptly pulled back-to-back and held in place like a hissing human triangle. That disrupted their spell and caused some wailing and gnashing of teeth. I paused; I almost left them there, bound only by their clothes, seemingly impotent for now. But then abruptly they calmed down and began to rotate in a circle, chanting something low and venomous. Each Norn in turn faced me and pulled a thread from the front of her garment, passing it to her sister on the left. They began to weave the threads, pulling and twisting and chanting all the while as they spun. It was seven kinds of creepy, and I knew I couldn’t let them finish whatever they were doing, because it would likely finish me. I drew Moralltach and charged, not caring if they heard me. Their yellow eyes widened as they heard my approach, but they didn’t stop chanting their spell, so I couldn’t allow myself to stop either. I swept Moralltach through their necks in a single broad sweep, their heads sailed away like ragged balls of gray twine, and thus were the Norse unyoked from the chains of destiny. And thus was I plunged into a galactic vat of doom.

“Damn it!” I shouted, frustrated beyond belief at how badly this had played out. I released my binding and let the bodies slump as they may. I slumped to the ground after them, dragged down by the weight of what I’d just done.

When you steal an apple, you can simply disappear. That had been my plan. But slay a manifestation of fate, and “they will find you,” as Hans Gruber pointed out in Die Hard .

I chewed over the idea of aborting the mission. It had a nice light flavor to it, a piquant savor of surprise. I could try my hand at being unemployed in Greenland. Maybe that would keep me off the radar. Laksha would never find me there, I felt sure.

But the Norse probably would. And Oberon would be miserable. There was the bitter aftertaste.

Still, I had time to think of something better; I had until New Year’s to get the golden apple. Laksha wouldn’t start looking for me until then, and that would allow me to plan a thorough disappearance.

Except that then I would be running from both Laksha and the Norse. Whether I liked it or not, killing the Norns in self-defense made me an enemy of the whole pantheon. Stealing an apple at this point could hardly make it worse. That being the case, I decided to see the mission through and at least expunge my debt to Laksha.

I wiped Moralltach clean on one of the Norns’ gowns and resheathed it before squatting down and sinking my fingers through fallen leaves into the springy turf of Asgard, which was surprisingly akin to a moor—at least in the immediate vicinity of Yggdrasil. The Norns’ bodies had turned sickeningly black. I spoke to the earth through my tattoos and it acknowledged me, though it felt strained and far away, as if it had to struggle through a layer of cheesecloth. Obediently it parted to let the bodies of the Norns sink into its peaty depths, and obediently it closed again, leaving no trace of what had happened to them. That chore done, I scoured the earth around the base of the tree to find a few small remnants of Ratatosk, the finest of squirrels. I was glad I had left him feeling good about himself. I carefully placed the fragments of bone in a pouch attached to my belt. Later I would say words for him.