KUNTA! FUKJA! DRIT!”
Gest woke up, swearing. Those fuckers had tried to kill him. It always hurt much more than he remembered. His chest felt like he had been kicked by a mule, and his whole left side was writhing with invisible electricity. Added to that, the klaxons were damn loud, and just in case you slept through them, someone was firing the sonic cannons too. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up feeling this sore, but from all the commotion around him, he suspected it might be the last.
That was something, at least.
He had tried to warn them, but there was no use in being bitter. He always knew it was a fool’s errand. Who was going to believe a story like his? The thousand-year-old farmer, come to warn of a fairy-tale foe. Gest had no genetics on file that would even give them pause for thought. For one thing, he hated change—he left off popular music when the piano replaced the harpsicord. For another, he was just too damned old; he counted rheumatism as his bosom friend. No, he’d lived long enough without being spliced and diced to start moving things around now. The military had thought him a spy and repaid treachery with cyanide. Marshall Thunder always acted first, asked questions later. You couldn’t blame him after what they’d seen in the war.
Gest instinctively reached for his harp, with the secret compartment keeping his candle safe. It was as tough as he was, carved long ago from a red-bark tree. Indestructible, the Skræling Dreamer had said, and it had survived five hundred more years, surpassing the warranty. Not a bad trade for a handful of beads. Strange; he’d been captured or killed a dozen times over the years, but no one ever took it from him, or when they did, it was always easy to find, thrown in a junk pile or discarded on a table. He’d long since decided it had a glamour on it.
The warnings continued, three oscillating and shrill tones, an Alert Ready system broadcast to all householders, everywhere, all at once. The fylkir’s personal calculator was responsible for all the din. MIM was delivering a steady flow of information, digesting and regurgitating data from across the Nine Worlds on banks of monitors that made up the far wall. They were all showing loops of eerily silent destruction, with no sound but for the alarm.
The world ends not with a bang, but with a mute button, he thought.
He was still sitting in the imperial chambers, on a jet-black wooden chair. Mímameiðr wood, like a finely upholstered tarantula. The room was empty otherwise, except for a few bits of detritus on the floor and a discarded negligee on the unmade bed. He didn’t know where the empress was, although he suspected she’d been consigned to the laboratory furnace of history. The Mayfly Queen, Empress for a Day. Gest had always thought politics was a dirty business, but the cardinal rule was surely never trust the Varangians. Who guards the guards? Oh well, he thought, so much for his plan of going straight to the top.
There was a goblet half-hidden under the sheet and wine spilled underneath. Dry to the touch. He’d been gone for a while then. Normally, if there was such a thing, he came back within hours, but sometimes days had passed. They hadn’t bothered to tie him, and they certainly hadn’t bothered to come and collect him. Given the images he saw on the screens that covered the far wall, the navy had their hands full. He’d missed the events real time—as far as he could tell, most of the broadcast were replays.
He watched the carnage with resignation. Here it was, then—the thread was cut. It was little consolation that all other threads in existence were being severed at the same time. Well, that shows how far mankind had come, he thought. Ragnarok was being broadcast live.
ON MIDGARD, THE EARTH SHOOK violently with a series of deep-sea detonations. MIM showed graphs, predictive analyses, measuring atmospheric composition as the waters bubbled up methane. Close to Miklagard, the North Anatolian fault ruptured. The European side thrashed into the Black Sea, which replied with a satisfied belch of hydrogen sulfide, poisoning the remaining denizens of the Great City in an instant. Fireballs followed, the gas reacting with the fabric of the city, storms of acid and flame savaging her proud beauty. The tidal waves were a mercy, wiping her ruined visage clean. The broken Dome of the Church of Holy Wisdom turned black as whatever souls were left departed. The screens flashed an advisory:
Hydrogen sulfide can cause inhibition of the cytochrome oxidase enzyme system resulting in lack of oxygen use in the cells.
That was funny, he thought. The central nervous system of the empire had been paralyzed, her people suffocated, and MIM offered a science lesson. No wonder the rank and file despised the machine.
He watched as the land wracked and writhed, cities tottered then crashed headlong from their foundations. The Gulrstein Caldera spewed magma and ash across the west, the Brenna Ring turning the Peaceful Ocean into a steaming cauldron. Seawalls cracked and buckled, filthy water surged through townships across the Rim as if Hafgufa had risen again. Ash eclipsed the sun, just like it had on Jötunheim.
Gest was relieved that he didn’t have any loved ones. He stopped making attachments centuries ago. The cities, though, he’d been to most of them. He mourned their passing: New Jorvik, Sveinsey, Reykjarvík, Austrióss—all funeral pyres.
The door was sealed, wedged shut on the outside, a temporary repair after the Varangians had smashed through, but a solid one. He couldn’t see any way out of the chamber. He sat on the bed, pouring himself wine and smoking clove kretek cigarettes he’d bummed in Jayakarta. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. It was like the election all over again, although if he’d have known the empress had such a great taste in Gothic reds, he might have voted for her.
As the hours wore on, the broadcasts showed that Mannerheim had sailed with the fleet, hoping to coordinate a rescue. The Drakkar arrived in the sky like Valkyries to rescue the fallen, to deliver hope, to bring salvation. But that too ended in disaster. The Odin was swallowed in a sea of desperate refugees; the Thor’s systems were clogged by ash and pumice, and the great ark was wrecked. The crew of the Tyr mutinied and had to be executed by their fellow Úlfhéðnar to restore order to the fleet. The admiral was broadcasting directly now, giving orders mechanically. The Naglfar, the great Audgudson bio-ship, broke her moorings, and the decrepit old tinkerers went wailing into the night. The empire was dimming; the broadcasts swamped by people sharing the sheer scale of the catastrophe, before being snuffed out themselves in countless, horrifying ways.
The advisories continued throughout the night, but mercifully, the klaxons stopped. The sonic cannon too. Silence reigned now, the stillness broken only by the occasional frenzied knocking on the door. He ignored them; it wasn’t as if he could open it or provide enlightenment. Gest had never been fitted for a visor and couldn’t engage with anybody outside the room. He numbed the disquiet he felt with another gulp of wine and sat back to watch text crawl across MIM’s screens.
HE MUST HAVE DOZED OFF for another few hours, although all the broadcasts showed different times and it was hard to be sure. His mother always said wine, women, and song would be his downfall. She’d been almost right. He was so drunk on the imperial cellar, it was only when the door started melting that Gest released that Mímisbrunnr itself was now under assault.
It was a prison break. In one corner of the wall of broadcasts was a screen showing the interior of the Ring. Spiky rime-jewelled supermen, night terrors from the dark side of the planet below, marched through the sections, slaying the Skuld with abandon. MIM had recorded it all. He had simply missed it in between the mayhem. The Roarer had worked with phenomenal speed, shaping the outlaws of Náströnd to his liking, moulding them to fit the fabric of the world on either side of the terminator line in the burrows of old Mímisbrunnr. The Sons of Muspell had shattered Bifrost in their ascent, some falling back to the burning shores they came from, but still more came searing into the naval yards.
The door was almost burned through now. Gest hadn’t come this far to surrender to a Jötunn. The draugr could rot in whatever he used as a tomb. Even at the end of all things, a Viking should find time for one last fight, he thought. Wasn’t that the whole point of Ragnarok?
He rolled away from the monitors to the far side of the bed and used his leg to snag the black chair that had been so good to him of late. He’d find a better use for it than interrogation.
He heard the axe whistling before he saw it. The hilt bounced awkwardly off the ceiling and the axe clattered to the floor, blade flat to the ground. Gest noted that, if there was a throwing gene, it wasn’t enhanced in this latest design. He made a grab for the weapon then stood up, holding the Mímameiðr chair as a shield.
There were two Jötnar. He’d handled a pair before, but with a whole squad of Úlfhéðnar in support, and of course, the wine wasn’t helping matters. The genius of the draugr was to use test tubes and petri-dishes to bring nightmares out of memory and into the slaughter. The Father of Monsters had surpassed himself with this new batch, making just about the ugliest things Gest had ever seen. These two were lurid pink, a fusion of spiny armour crammed over blubber and oily fur. They had four sets of stubby appendages, eight arms and legs, each brandishing claws, which explained the terrible throw at least.
Gest recognised them as vastly overgrown specimens from the Utgard laboratories; the screens had been full of anatomical drawings and gene-maps. Microscopic bugs, but the Verðandi had called them wonder weapons: the Roarer’s latest find, able to survive the boiling volcanic springs at Hvergelmir or the icy wastes of the Himalayas with equal ease. The stallari had laughed in their faces. The war was virtually over, and the threat never materialized.
Now, Gest was about to eat their words. He had to hand it to the draugr: graft them into human cells, and the bugs turned out formidably.
The Jötnar had tubular mouths, rather than a jawline brimming with teeth. They drawled rather than spoke, not that he could understand a word—and not that you ever tried to reason with a Jötunn, unless you wanted them to rip your tongue out before they gouged out your heart. He held up the chair to ward them off. The first Jötunn funnelled out what passed for laughter in nightmare land.
“Hrimthurssar, hrimthurssar,” they hooted.
Gest briefly regretted leaving P.T. Barnheim in the Panic of ’37. Still, he knew a thing or two about big game hunting. He prowled around his adversaries looking for a gap to exploit.
“You know the secret to lion taming, you pig-fucking maggots? The chair does the important work. You hold it up like so, and the lion tries to focus on all four legs of the chair at the same time.”
Gest edged closer, the Jötnar watching the blackwood waving hypnotically in front of them.
“With its focus divided—”
He drove two chair legs straight through the head of one of the creatures, simultaneously pinning the other’s shoulder with a third. He slid underneath their flailing bodies, trying to shut out the shrill screams. He struck at what he thought were leg tendons with the axe, but the blackwood proved much more penetrating. Gest reached up and turned the chair like a corkscrew. The surviving Jötunn lost its footing, allowing him enough purchase to grind it back into a corner.
Both Jötnar were crumpled and dying. The way they were splayed out on the chair reminded him of the good old days, one of the ancient níðstang, the curse poles he used to set, but there wasn’t time to dignify them with a curse or reminisce further.
He turned around slowly, dreading what might appear on the next broadcasts. The Roarer was there, on all the screens at once, each slightly out of sync. His old friend was laughing, the crazed belly laugh of a clown, albeit hauntingly silent. Like a side-splitting routine in talkies, a golden oldie from the Wizards of Midvaten. The slight delay between monitors made his face flicker, as if each signal had a poor frame rate. The “again-walkers” gave themselves away, wreathed in foxfire. Gest had seen that halo on all the broadcasts. That was why he re-enlisted. It was there now, in the static.
The senior Skuld, Niði Bohr, was on the central screen, surrounded by a ring of ruin. The monitors looked like a chess board, with Bohr the surrounded king. He was going to fire HEIMDAL, he said, even if the blast would destroy them all. It was best to lose all that knowledge, better than giving it to the enemy. Or something like that—Gest was doing his best to lip read. He remembered he’d served with his grandfather, or maybe his great-grandfather, on HMS Hǫttr. He had every faith in the lector to go down all guns blazing.
The screen went dead, leaving Gest alone with his ghosts. He had to run if he was to save his skin.
“Then the gods took the sparks and burning embers that were flying about after they had been blown out of Muspellheimr, and placed them in the midst of the firmament both above and below to give light to heaven and earth. They gave their stations to all the fires, some fixed in the sky, some moved in a wandering course beneath the sky, but they appointed them places and ordained their courses.”
—Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, “Gylfaginning”
THE NEAREST HANGAR WAS A wide-open wound, ripped apart by an unimaginable force. Some of the great Skuld missiles were still pirouetting above the fracture, globules of fire smouldering where they had struck home. He snatched an oxygen mask and hurled himself across the emptiness, through ruptured suits and desiccated Einherjar bodies, aiming for one of the shuttle craft on the far side. A mottled Hrimthurssar, partly roasted by the explosions, hooted at him from a loading bay as it drifted slowly out of sight, spinning in the fluctuating gravity.
As a boy, Gest used to lie under the stars, naming the constellations. Óðinn’s Vagn was always there—the All Father, who, stepping into his chariot, held seven stars in his hand, showing his people the way. Gest would watch the leidang and dream of raiding foreign shores, knowing the warriors were guided by the leiðarstjarna, augu Þjaza, or Friggjarrokkr. He remembered it being bitterly cold as the boats drifted out of the bay, covering the horizon with a thousand painted sails.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen those stars for hundreds of years, but still, those days seemed more real to him than the alien skies outside the Ring. A perpetual red-blood evening, a gown pierced with diamond studs. He reached the door, prised it open, and flung himself inside. He was operating on instinct. At his age, he was surprised to find self-preservation was such a driving force. Perhaps it was because he was the keeper of his own demise—the candle was his to light, and his alone. He certainly wasn’t going to give the Roarer that satisfaction.
The shuttle was already spooled up. There were two gapmenn splashed in the drive seats, unconscious but breathing.
“They were like that when I found them,” rasped a familiar voice from behind him.
Niði Bohr. Alive and kicking.
“I suspect they tried to fire up the shuttle’s drive for a quick escape. Didn’t engage the magnetic field properly.”
“Will they be okay?” the old Viking asked.
He turned to face Bohr, cooped up in the rear of the shuttle, like a brooding hen. His visor was dark, as if he had been ready to use the drive himself. The lector appeared unarmed and didn’t seem threatened or surprised by Gest’s sudden arrival.
“A bad case of neuralgia. Damaged nerves, headaches. That kind of thing. Or maybe, just a bad case of nostalgia. Looks like there is going to be a lot to miss,” Bohr said, looking out the rear hollow at the burning deck. “You’re looking a little more… perky than when we last met. Glad to see you up and about. MIM was right. I’m not sure why I am surprised. Infinity does rather cover all eventualities.”
“I thought you were going to blow the Ring. Make like lightning and bolt,” Gest said.
“No hurry. We’ve got time on our side. Well, you do. How much of this ‘situation’ do you understand?” The Skuld carried on looking out, scanning for signs of attack.
“It’s hard to misunderstand the end of the world. I’ve heard it described plenty of times. Have you ever visited Aztland? Hot and humid place, full of lakes and mountain springs, a week’s sail north of Rauðstréland. I travelled there once, met the wisest man I ever knew. Fasting Coyote was his name. I told him about our empire that stretched across the seas and the skies. I warned him that it was soon to swallow his cities too. You know what he said?”
“Enlighten me,” said Bohr.
“The caverns of Earth are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sat upon thrones, deciding causes, possessing treasures, governing armies, conquering provinces, tearing down temples, flattering themselves with pride, majesty, fortune, praise, and dominion. These glories have passed like the dark smoke thrown out by the fires of volcanoes, leaving no monuments but the rude skins on which they are written.”
“You’ve a good memory.” The Skuld seemed genuinely impressed.
Gest shrugged. “Easy to remember. The empress called me a walking history book. This rude skin is all I have of value. Besides, Ragnarok isn’t rocket science.”
“No, but it is quantum mechanics. Do you know what that is?” said Bohr.
“From the Latin quantus, meaning how great?”
“You know Latin?” He seemed even more impressed, excited even, if the wobbling of his chins was anything to go by.
“I knew someone once who did,” Gest said.
“I can only imagine. Clearly, the world we knew is ending. We might be the only four people left alive.” The Skuld sighed heavily and returned his gaze to the window, evidently hopeful that some of his colleagues might also make it to the hangar.
Gest looked down at the lifers. On closer inspection, one of them was female.
“Even if she’ll have us, I’m too old for children, and no offence, you might be too fat. It’s a moot point—what kind of a world would they be brought into?”
“No offence taken. I’ve no interest in children of my own. But, my dear fellow, Ragnarok isn’t an ending. It’s a chance to try again,” he said, matter-of-factly, looking down at the unconscious crew.
An explosion rocked the whole Ring, and both men were forced to steady themselves on whatever they could hold onto.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving?” said Gest.
“Like I said, no hurry. If I am right, all of this…” Bohr gestured widely. “…has to wait for you.”
“Very polite, but I’m no one special. I’m not much more than a farmer that Odin forgot to take into Valhöll.” Gest laughed, joylessly.
The Skuld grew serious and pointed a finger straight at Gest. His voice trembled with accusation.
“Once a candleman, always a candleman, the apprentice holding a light for his master to work. You, sir, are much more than that. Do you really think you stayed alive because of a fucking candle not being lit?”
“You don’t believe in prophecies?” Gest recalled the interrogation quite clearly, despite the drugs. He knew the lector had heard as much of his life story as anyone.
“I believe only in the world at my fingertips. A prophecy isn’t magic. It is best explained as a form of entangled history. Two parts of time that have become inextricably and intimately linked. One in the past, one in the future. One forwards, one backwards. Now, you are a quirk of fate, in the sense that you are anchored between alternate realities as well. Sideways, in a sense. I think you have been caught up in something we barely have the words for.”
Gest tried to laugh, but his attempt just made a hollow sound. His throat had gone dry.
“I wouldn’t expect you to. I’m not sure I do, and I am one of the smartest men who ever lived. You know what an expert really is? A person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. What I am trying to tell you is this: you shouldn’t be here, a thousand years after you were born. You know that, deep down. And in some senses, you aren’t here. I checked with MIM, after our little chat earlier with the admiral. Nornagest is born, lives a long and eventful life, but dies in the reign of Olaf Tryggvason.”
“Never heard of him.”
“No, in fairness, neither had I. King of Norway, 995 to 1000 AD apparently. Converted the North to Christianity. MIM pulled it out of a text called the Flateyjarbók.”
“Never heard of that, either.”
“Quite. The history of Tryggvason and the Flateyjarbók doesn’t exist for us. In our reality, Christianity has collapsed to the Fringes, and places like Mímisbrunnr. Places where only outcasts and misfits survive.”
“I know that too. I speared the Patriarch of Rome. If I close my eyes, I can still hear his prayers. So, what? I am in two places at once? I have a twin I never met?”
“In the reality MIM found, Christianity is the dominant religion. You were a living relic, the last remaining survivor of the Age of Heroes. You were baptised and freed from the protection of the Norns. King Olaf lit your candle himself. Did you know this? Nornagest, from the Old Norse, means ‘guest of the Norns.’”
“Him I know. Them I’ve met, although I was a babe-in-arms.”
“Names have power. Yggdrasil whispers them to us throughout eternity. They are patterns to be traced and recognised, clues waiting to be deciphered.”
Gest might have been shocked by some of this, had he not woken up a few dozen times, healed of a wound that would have felled an ox. It was actually a relief to find someone to talk about it with at long last.
“So, what are you suggesting? You understand why I have lived so long? It’s more than a prophecy, or what the Norns decreed?”
“Maybe. I haven’t had time to sit down and work through the implications. MIM had no sooner dredged up your details than Miklagard imploded and all this began. I have a working theory. There are all kinds of forces of attraction in the universe, gravity, magnetism, electricity and so on. We haven’t discovered them all. When we calculated why the universe is structured the way it is, we found there simply isn’t enough of it to keep it all neat and tidy. There must be something that keeps the stars clustered. Keeps it all working. Something that breathes life into the Nine Worlds. A Cosmological Constant, my friend Einnsteinen called it. Perhaps the Norns are that constant.”
“You people with the seiðr, the Orders, you can’t see all these links? Not even using your mathematics?”
“Everything we experience is only a tiny fraction of reality. As to the rest, we are in the dark. I have an analogue in the other thread too, Niels Henrik David Bohr, according to MIM. Other than that, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
“I’m sorry. This isn’t a world I am familiar with. Did I mention, I retired from all this? I wanted some peace and quiet, lived with the Skræling. Carry on far enough, beyond the Grjótbjǫrg there is a coast, with countless islands, like crumbs swept from a banquet table. Good for fishing,” Gest said, happily sailing on the parts of the Peaceful Ocean that still lapped at the corners of his mind.
“But you came back,” said Bohr. “That speaks volumes. You were pulled back by this unseen force.”
“I only came out of the West when I heard the broadcasts. I came to deal with it, put an end to the mischief of the barrow-fiend.” The thought capsized his mental boat, almost as violently as it had the first time.
“I know why you came back. If I were to bet, whatever you are, you aren’t alone. Interesting you can’t mention its name.” The Skuld tapped his finger on the side of his nose.
“The draugr? His name was Olaf.”
“And you two have a shared history?”
“We go way back. I can’t remember the first time I met him, but I was already old. Remember, I was in my prime when the Gotar sailed for Reidgotaland and Sigurd the Völsung went to war, when Rome fell to fire and sword—somewhere at the turn of the first millennium.”
Bohr clapped his hands in delight.
“About the time your candle was lit. If we follow the Christian thread. That’s not a coincidence. The Universe doesn’t like inconsistencies.”
“The last time I saw him, before Jötunheim that is, was his funeral near Jorvik. He shouldn’t be alive. You think the mound-dweller has a Norn’s blessing too? A talisman of his own?”
Nothing surprised him anymore, not even seeing an old comrade returned as a draugr. He was certain the body had been burnt and sent out to sea with all the reverence due a great Viking hero, but there had been so many men slain in those days, so many honours for the fallen.
Bohr shook his head.
“Probably not a literal candle. More of a shadow, a halo. Did you ever stop to wonder if you were a draugr too, returned from the grave?”
“What? No,” said Gest. “The draugr owns all kinds of deceits and masks that—”
“Odin was as much a trickster as Loki. Don’t worry, I am not accusing you of being a beast from beyond. But I am saying, you share a common bond.”
Gest remembered the camaraderie of the Viking Age. The hirdsmenn had always been joined at the hip. The Skuld was making a spooky kind of sense.
“Blood-brothers, then, like Loki is to Odin. And if I am an anomaly from our thread of history then—”
“He is probably a glitch too,” said Bohr. “From the other side of whatever coin is currently spinning. A Christian warrior, a warden like Heimdallr. Come to collect his debts. This Olaf is likely a cipher for you. He wiped his fingerprints from MIM’s memory, so I can’t tell you more. But he shouldn’t be here any more than you should.”
Bohr looked very pleased with himself and leaned back against the window. All manner of memories were bubbling to the surface now, and Gest found he was suddenly able to solve his own puzzles.
“Well, that explains something. That’s why the Witch Queen only saw three witnesses in her dream. I could never understand that. So, what happens next? The shade has been denied his rightful thread, so he has brought about our doom. But you were saying he can’t proceed without me?”
“My conjecture is that the Thought and Memory Drive has unravelled reality. Creation is like a knot, full of tangled threads. Separate, yes, but intimately linked. Now those threads are teasing apart. We’ve inadvertently broken a bond without knowing it. One of those forces of attraction I was talking about.”
“We’ve killed the Norns?” Gest groaned.
“If you like. You said Ellisif spoke of one who would rock Yggdrasil to its roots. The World Tree is the best-known example of entanglement.”
“A wave is a ring. There is seldom a single wave. This doom or the next,” Gest intoned, lost in thought.
“What do you mean?” Bohr’s mind was certainly more agile than his body, but the old warrior was going places he couldn’t follow.
“Another thing Ellisif once said,” Gest said. “This kind of thing happens over and over, does it?”
“You do have a good memory. The passage of time isn’t a corridor from point A to point B, it’s a great boundless sea. And you and your friend are making waves. I wonder where they go.”
Gest didn’t know what else to say. He thought about how Harald would have dealt with the conundrum, but resisted the temptation to swear repeatedly. There were another series of explosions outside that shook the floor. No one else was coming.
“Shall we leave the sermon for later? I doubt our Loki has quite finished with us yet. Will this thing work?” he said, jutting his chin in the direction of the lifers slumped over the control panel.
“I’ve no doubt that I can fire it up,” Bohr said.
“Where do we go? Can we escape Ragnarok? Even Odin was inevitably swallowed by the wolf,” Gest said.
He made room for the lector to squeeze past him and slump into the pilot seat. Bohr began running through the systems, sifting over the interface on his visor.
“Did you see the body? Never assume someone is dead unless you see the body,” he said.
“I’m sorry, this is my first Ragnarok,” Gest said, mustering all the sarcasm the end of the world warranted.
“I’m saying that an old conjurer like Odin could escape his fate. He’d worked with the Norns long enough. In all the invisible places we’ve discussed, you don’t think he carved a back door? Made a hide-away? Oh, heavens…”
Bohr suddenly stopped, lost momentarily in thought. He whistled, then turned to look straight at Gest, a whole new level of excitement trembling through him.
“Even Trumba guessed it, intuited it, with her limited grasp of seiðr. A circular argument, she called it. Yggdrasil hasn’t been whispering. She is an echo chamber. She’s been warning us.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the sagas, who is Odin’s father?”
Gest was back on familiar territory. Campfire songs and legendary sagas were his meat and drink.
“Borr. Son of Búri,” he answered, without hesitation.
“Borr, yes. Sound familiar?”
Gest had thought he’d seen it all. He’d seen fylkirs and emperors crowned and killed and stared disbelieving as Karl Lind vanished before his eyes, but he’d never witnessed anything as bold as this.
“Niði Bohr, have you taken a knock to the head?”
“It might surprise you to know that my family have always been intimately involved with immortals. My grandfather taught Iðunn Lind, you know. Oh, you can wipe that worried look off your face. I’m not saying I am literally Odin’s father. But I don’t think that matters. Not everyone has a memory like yours, you see? For example, in a few minutes, I’ll deploy HEIMDAL. We named the system after Heimdallr, the warden of the gods. Seemed a suitable acronym, all things considered. But what if future generations name the god after the weapons system? What if we have created a loop? A self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-entangled world. That’s why MIM can’t explain it to me. She’s been cut off.”
Gest wasn’t convinced. “Bohr, you have more in common with Fasting Coyote than you might imagine. He also spoke to an Unknown, Unknowable Lord of Everywhere, to whom he built an entirely empty temple. They still carried him out on a cart.”
The Skuld studiously ignored him and continued to make preparations. His computations looked feverish, his brow sweating.
“Well my friend, if I am right, you are the only one who can fix this.”
“How many chances do I get?” Gest hauled a lifer to the back of the shuttle and strapped them in.
“This isn’t a joke, I’m afraid,” Bohr called back.
“Why me?” Gest yelled over the cycling engines. He wrestled the second lifer into a redundant seat, straining to hear the lector’s explanation.
“We could never find the gods, no matter how much we searched the Nine Worlds. You were always there, hiding in plain sight, dressed up in the guise of a Christian legend. An impossible hidey-hole, kept safe by all the minds beyond our ken. All these strangely intelligent minds that silently surround and interpenetrate us. Call them álfar as beautiful as the sun or call them entangled electrons waltzing on solar rays. Call them Norns controlling our destiny or call them Dark Energy, binding the Gap. They’ve been talking to us, but we don’t know how to listen. Let’s face it, this current history veered off somewhere distasteful. Perhaps the further the wave travels, the weaker it becomes.”
“What are you talking about?” Gest crept back to the front, crawling with horror at what he thought he’d heard.
Bohr turned to face him again, pivoting in the seat. “I think you are Odin. Or you will be. You are going to carry the seeds of creation with you back into the past. All those stories, all that history. The Mímameiðr, too. You will plant the World Tree.”
“Bikkju-sonr. Assuming for one second that any of that were true, how will I do that?”
“Because I am going to send you.”
“No!” Gest bellowed.
But it was too late.
The whole shuttle hummed as the Oblivion Link completed. He felt the Skuld rummaging in his mind, unlocking secrets, sifting through his past. There was no stopping him; he was far too skilled at that kind of thing. Fully armed, Bohr staggered away as far as he could, as quickly as he could, hauling the vessel with all the heartfelt force of a millennium of memories. The shuttle tumbled through the void like a leaf in a gale.
Gest could feel the lector’s mind too. He stood witness as HEIMDAL erupted, eviscerating the remaining sons of Muspell. There was delight, exhilaration, triumph…
Then nothing.
In that split second, Surt reached out his sword. The light was excruciatingly, catastrophically bright. Even at their impossible distance, the shuttle groaned.
Behind them, doors were dismantled, crushed in the deepest well of all: gravity. The sword swung further still, cleaving the heavens with two brilliant beams of destruction. Gest screamed in pain, his skin blistering, his eye sockets burning in the afterglow and the heavens screamed with him.
The planet of ice and fire shattered, the crust and hot iron innards spilling into the cool Gap, a stream of rocks and particles sucked into the coruscating clouds of light at the edge of an ominous black disc. Mímisbrunnr boiled away into the witch’s brew.
| The sun turns black, | | | earth sinks in the sea, |
| The hot stars down | | | from heaven are whirled; |
| Fierce grows the steam | | | and the life-feeding flame, |
| Till fire leaps high | | | about heaven itself |
THE STARS HAD ALL VANISHED now. All that remained was Ginnungagap, nothing without end. There were still winds, though, great gusts blowing in from the sea. He could smell the salt, feel the air.
But Gest’s eyes were gone. Supernovas were son-of-a-bitch painful.
He might shake off the injuries. He had in the past. But there wasn’t much likelihood of his eye-sight returning to empty sockets. He didn’t heal that well.
Somehow, he felt lighter. He was certain that Olaf had roared his last, just as he was certain the draugr had triggered the insatiable black hole, the Ultimate Devourer. Nothing survived that, not light, not even the ravings of a madman. Whatever the creature was, it had been swallowed in the maelstrom.
Bohr was gone too. He felt for the pulse on the old Skuld’s neck, but he’d already felt his mind snap out of existence. In sharing consciousness, he’d found no meaning, no revelation, no enlightenment. Just oblivion. At the moment he jumped, the Skuld became what he beheld. Shame, Gest thought. He hadn’t known him long, but he felt a certain kinship.
All the magnificence of the Empire of the Heavens had been obliterated too. The shuttle’s link to MIM had collapsed. There was no voice recognition. That wasn’t surprising given the scale of the destruction. He had no way of telling where they had landed—or when. He heard cows though, mooing contently. If there were cows, placid, docile, milk-giving cows, they could survive.
He couldn’t see if the on-board data was intact. Without a link, the systems would decay anyway, leaving fragments of information. There were four of the short, squat boxes on board, the ones the Skuld had used to run errands and make repairs. He didn’t have any skill with technology, but he asked them to form a perimeter and patrol the four quadrants, and they seemed obliging enough. It was a military staple. Who knew what was lurking out there in the dark? The Bots would help the lifers when, if, they awoke—but he wasn’t too worried about that. There were wearing Gap-suits after all, and naval types were a hardy bunch. They’d likely been spliced with some Jötunn DNA.
Gest didn’t have the energy to start over, to stitch everything back together, despite Bohr’s urging. He was tired beyond belief. There wasn’t much use waiting around to exchange pleasantries. He felt around for the distress beacon, set it, and walked off into the night. He assumed it was night, anyway. He was cold and shivering, despite the burns.
He still had his harp. And his candle. The Norns were still watching.
Over the centuries, he’d travelled the length and breadth of the Nine Worlds looking for answers, looking for the gods to make sense of it all. At times, he’d considered the possibility he was divine. Was he Christ reborn, come to judge the world at its end? Was he to be adored as the visible expression of Ahura Mazda, the eternal light of righteousness? Was he, as the Brahman would have it, a divine and an omniscient flame? The living symbol of the triumph of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, hope over despair? Perhaps he was Odin, just as Bohr said, detached from his wagon and searching for his sense of self. If he was a god, he’d find out soon enough.
Either that or he was a mistake. An ember escaped from the celestial fire, cascading through the ages, a mote of stardust. He hadn’t achieved any victories, after all. He hadn’t changed the world or saved his people from the twilight, when the worlds of man and gods had needed him most. He’d saved his own hide and left the rest as pestilential dust.
He’d sailed with the sons of Ragnar, though. That was something. He’d been candleman to the greatest warriors, their faithful squire, holding true and watching. Perhaps that was who he was: a witness, fated to record the full length of the twine, the ravelling and unravelling of existence. He had the nagging thought that Olaf had tricked him, over and over again. When the wolf gets old, he becomes a clown for the dogs.
The cows mooed in agreement, making him hungry and miserable. He traced the lines of countless scars, a tapestry of tales. He thought of the skalds. Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, but song passes not away. No music now, no audience for his songs, no warming fires in the Rus wilds.
But he could soon fix that. He felt all the duels and deaths, and found his body groaning for release. He reached for the battered old harp, and played one last time, two old senescent friends, reminiscing.
Then he took the hoary candle and rolled it in his palm. With a sigh, he touched it to his tinderbox.
“Let there be light.”
SOS SOS SOS AF YMIR YMIR YMIR TRUMBA V PSN 54.24.0 N, 3.26.0 W CODE SILVER ABANDONING SHIP AR K MESSAGE REPEATS