Kevin Hearne: Hammered

The Norns would be missed when the gods held their council in the morning, so I had until then to steal a golden apple and get out of Dodge. I couldn’t afford to linger, but I took a moment to look up at the towering trunk of Yggdrasil and fix in my memory my avenue of escape. Its size beggared the imagination; extending for miles in either direction, it gave the illusion of being an immense wooden wall rather than a cylinder. I assumed that there must be another hole in the trunk somewhere that Ratatosk used to access the root that led to Niflheim. A few minutes’ jog counterclockwise found it, and I noted that it looked a bit larger and more well used than the other one. Satisfied that I wouldn’t confuse the two holes and take the wrong exit home, I followed the directions Ratatosk had given me—not to Gladsheim but rather directly to Idunn’s hall. I ran west and slightly south toward the northernmost range of the Asgard Mountains, and if I got there after nightfall, which seemed likely, I could hope for Gullinbursti’s mane to act as a homing beacon. I leeched a wee bit of power from the earth with every step to keep myself fresh and tireless. I’d probably arrive there as Odin was working the gods into a froth over rumors of betrayal in Svartálfheim and invasion from a Roman god. I’d kicked the Norse anthill a good one, and now the gods would come spilling out, seeking something to bite.

In many ways, I’m disappointed that Star Trek never became a religion. The archetypal skeleton was there, but they never strove to make it anything more than a TV show. If they’d capitalized on it, then its adherents would have orders from the nebulous gods of the Federation to explore new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before; the crew of the Enterprise could have been minor gods—angels, perhaps—guiding us through our personal frontiers on a daily basis. Spock could have been the angel of logic on your left shoulder, pointing out fallacious reasoning and suggesting courses of action based on mountains of evidence, while Kirk could have been the angel of emotion on your right shoulder, exhorting you to gird your loins, check your gut, and follow your instincts.

“Kill ’em all, Atticus,” imaginary Kirk said in my right ear. “One blow from Moralltach is all it takes. They can’t see you; it’ll be easy.”

“That would be unwise,” imaginary Spock said to the fragments of cartilage dangling on my left. A German witch had shot off most of my left ear three weeks ago, and while the healing was going better than the time a demon had chewed off my right one, it still didn’t look very good. “A better course of action would be to complete the mission stealthily. The probability of injury or death increases exponentially once your presence is discovered, coupled with time for the alarm to spread.”

Kirk kissed his self-control good-bye. “Damn it, Spock, we’re on a different plane of existence here, and sometimes you just have to say fuck it and let your balls swing heavy, free, and low. Right, Atticus? Kill ’em all! For Ratatosk!”

“Captain, our mission here is to purloin an apple that confers the vitality of youth to those who consume it, nothing more. Wholesale slaughter is neither advisable nor necessary.”

“What is it with you, Spock? Always prudence and caution and tiptoeing through the tulips. Don’t you have any stones in your Vulcan panties?”

“My reproductive organs are both present and in perfect working order, Captain, but that is hardly germane to our discussion. One cannot solve every problem through sheer machismo and violence.”

“Why not? It works for Chuck Norris.”

This is how I entertain myself when I have to run for hours and I can’t worry anymore about the ninety-nine ways I could die. I should have brought an iPod.

The moorish demesne of Yggdrasil gave way beneath my churning feet to the Plain of Idavoll, an impressive expanse of untamed grassland that hid plump pheasants, prairie voles, and sleek red foxes. Clouds hung like torn cotton in an achingly blue sky, and a late-autumn breeze blew scents of grass and earth in my face. It was a lovely day, but I could not enjoy it. A novice tracker could follow the trail I was leaving with little difficulty, and even though it was a planned tactic in the coming game of Seek and Destroy the Intruder, I couldn’t help but feel nervous about it.

I caught myself wishing that Scotty—the patron saint of all travelers?—could simply beam me across the plain to Idunn’s hall. Teleportation was his godlike power—that and getting his engines not only to warp speed, but to warp speed faster with nothing more than some auxiliary tubes and mysterious bypasses.

People used to think that Druids were capable of teleportation, but of course that’s nonsense. I’ve never disintegrated my atoms in one place and reassembled them in another. I have, however, run tirelessly for miles, as I was currently doing, faster than any normal man could huff and puff. And I’ve cheated by taking shortcuts through Tír na nÓg, where any grove can be bound to any Fae woodland on earth—Fae in the sense that it’s a healthy forest. Getting to Russia from Arizona took me less than five minutes: I shifted planes to Tír na nÓg, found the knots that led to a forest in Siberia like a railroad in my sight, then pulled myself along them until I was standing on the other side of the globe in the land of borscht and amusing furry hats. In order to make that shift, however, I’d had to get down to the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness from Tempe, and that had taken me nearly two hours. And once in Russia in a proper forest, it was a healthy three-hour trip overland to the high tundra lake bound to the Well of Mimir.

There were no shortcuts for me now. I’d have to run everywhere. But that, I came to decide, was not necessarily a bad thing. My longing for teleportation waned as I grew accustomed to the feel of the earth and the flow of magic beneath it. As far as ontological projections of human angst about the afterlife go, Asgard is one of the nicer ones. It is somewhat spare in its diversity of life, like the frozen lands the Norse hail from, but it is sharply rendered, redolent of mystery, and a bite of danger wafts about in the air.

Admittedly, the danger part might have been something I was projecting onto the wind. This wasn’t a fun run; it was insanely perilous.

Ratatosk had told me I would know immediately when I’d reached Vanaheim. For one thing, the purple teeth of the Asgard Mountains would loom large in front of me, and for another, the Plain of Idavoll would give way to harvested fields, idyllic farmland dotted with bright points of color on the horizon, where barns and granaries rested like the desultory afterthoughts of an impressionist’s brush, all waiting for winter’s first snow. I arrived there as the sun was setting in front of me, and I marveled at the imagination of the Norse, who thought that things like the sun and gravity and weather would behave the same way on a floating plane attached to an ash tree as they did on earth.

Still, they’d imagined their paradise well. If I wasn’t about to become the Norse’s most wanted, I would have liked to linger there awhile.

I kept running past the twilight songs of birds and cast night vision to save myself from injury. I had run for more than eight hours straight at ten miles per hour, and now the Asgard Mountains were close, jutting up into the early evening like towering ziggurats.

Another mile earned me a glimpse of a pale yellow glow shining just north of west over the canopy of a forest I was fast approaching. It was either a very large campfire, which I deemed unlikely, or it was the golden mane of Gullinbursti. Deciding I had run a bit too far south, I altered my course to head straight for it, and before long I stopped for the first time since I’d left the Norns. There was a river to cross here; it definitively marked the traditional border of Vanaheim, according to Ratatosk. I didn’t relish a swim, but I didn’t appear to have a choice. Flying across as an owl would mean leaving almost everything behind. I shrugged, sighed, and waded in. Everything that needed to be dry was safely tucked into a waterproof pouch anyway.