Part 7 (2/2)
The sibyl dumped sugar in her tea. ”You don't have to speak through the girl, Aesir black sheep. Your spell may have called me from the fringes of life, but it's not enough to bind me. I remain here out of choice, and I'll speak to whomever I wish.”
Hermod gaped at her. ”Well. Fine, then. First question: Can we stop the wolves from eating the sun and moon?”
The sibyl swatted Hermod's coffee cup to the floor, where it burst apart in ceramic fragments. Coffee splattered his legs.
”Can you make it so that your cup never shattered?”
”No, but I could cut your arms off.” Hermod made the threat so matter-of-factly that it gave Mist chills.
”But that wouldn't unbreak your cup,” the sibyl said with a calm that equaled Hermod's.
”I could have cut them off back on the beach when I first summoned you, before you spilled my coffee.”
”Perhaps, but you would still be without your coffee now. The chain of events through time is made of stronger links than your sword can cut through. Baldr fell, and therefore the wolf must eat the sun and moon, and since the wolf eats the sun and moon, the nine worlds must die. Each event falls irrevocably from the previous and triggers the next.”
”It's like a domino effect, then?” Mist asked.
”We had something like dominoes in the early days,” the sibyl said. ”We carved them from the bones of our enemies and burned the markings in. We called them something else, though. I had a nice set when I was a girl.”
”The domino effect,” Mist pressed on, trying to keep the sibyl on topic. ”If you tip one over, the others all fall. Unless you remove some down the line before they topple.”
”That's not how we played the game.”
”I'm not talking about a game. I'm asking you how things work. I'm asking if we can change it.”
The sibyl ripped open five more sugar packets and let the contents fall into her teacup. She drank without stirring. ”You need a better metaphor. Think of it as a ball of string. It can be a big, knotty ball, all convoluted, but it's still one single strand. Tug here, tug there, just one string.”
”But ... what if you cut the string and break the connection?”
”Oh, girl. You don't have shears sharp enough.” Her gaze crossed everyone at the table. ”None of you does. Accept it, as I do. Where you hear a pink new-born crying out its first breath, I hear the death rattle of the brittle-boned man it will become.” She drained the sludge from her cup and rose to her feet. ”Thank you for the tea.”
”We're not done here yet,” Hermod said. ”I still have questions.”
”You keep asking the wrong ones.”
”What should I ask you, then?”
”First of all, how about, 'Can I offer you the rest of my m.u.f.fin?'”
Hermod sighed and pushed his plate toward her. ”Dig in. What else?”
The sibyl returned to her seat. Hermod watched mournfully as she plucked away at his m.u.f.fin. She seemed very satisfied. ”Because I was given honey and pastry,” she said, smacking her lips, ”I will say one last thing to you: Go to Hel. In her realm, where even Odin won't tread, you will find the links in the chain at their weakest. There, if you will, you might still grasp a few dominoes.”
Mist carefully watched Hermod's reaction. He looked resigned, and Mist realized she'd won. With Hermod, she could make it to Helheim. Only now, having achieved her small but important victory, the ramifications of what they were going to do hit home. Making an incursion into death's realm was no small thing.
”Thank you for breakfast and for these lovely clothes,” the sibyl said, pus.h.i.+ng her chair back from the table. ”But I'll be leaving now. I'm missing my shows.” Straightening the horn sagging off her hat, she walked out of the cafe, into a curtain of rain.
After a time, hail struck the windows as hard as machine-gun fire.
LILLY CASTILLO REMEMBERED dying. She'd been walking home from grocery shopping, arguing with her sister, Kathy, as usual. Lilly had been back in California for only a month, but she was already thinking about leaving again. She knew some people in Oregon who were smuggling vegetable crops from government-funded hydroponic farms and distributing them to those without money or connections, the sort of thing that was right up her alley.
Naturally, Kathy hadn't been shy about telling Lilly what she thought about contraband networks, and they'd been on the edge of a major fight when Lilly felt a pinching pain in her ribs, accompanied by a heavy blow that knocked the air out of her.
She'd found herself on the ground, her cheek against the pavement beside her sister. Kathy said she'd been shot, and that's when Lilly understood what was happening.
She and Kathy were being killed.
She'd tried to s.h.i.+eld her sister with her body against further shots, while Kathy had tried to do the same for her. Then a second shot slammed into Lilly's belly. A moment of blood-red pain drained to a milky haze, and the road of walking corpses appeared.
Lilly hadn't wanted to join the other dead, but she'd known she had to. Death was just f.u.c.ked up like that.
Kathy had called to her, reached for her, tried to join her, but there'd been someone holding Kathy back, a tall redheaded woman outfitted in white furs and silver chain mail. She'd said things to Kathy, things that Lilly had caught only part of before the murmuring of the dead drowned out all other noise. Something about being a Valkyrie, about claiming Kathy for Odin's service. She'd called Kathy ”Mist.” It sounded to Lilly like a p.o.r.n-star name.
Carried along in the current of the dead, Lilly waved back to Kathy, blew her kisses, tried to tell her she was sorry for every slight, every wound, for every time she'd run away. But it was too late for that. Being dead meant never getting to say sorry.
Since arriving in Helheim, Lilly hadn't stopped moving. She walked across endless plains of gray dust until her body dragged with hunger. But there was no food. Her head ached and thirst made her tongue feel like an old sock, but there was no water. Her side and belly hurt from the bullet wounds, but she was getting used to the pain.
She missed green. She missed the sun's warmth on her cheeks and eyelids. She missed orange juice.
She thought she was doing a little better than many of the other dead. Most everyone else stood around like herds of sheep, quietly moaning or weeping or staring into the featureless distance in a state of catatonia.
It wouldn't do. Prisoners had obligations: survive, escape, sabotage. She understood that survival was out of her hands; she was dead, after all. And if there was some kind of deeper, more permanent death after this one, she didn't know how it worked or how to avoid it. Despite her ache for it, food and water didn't appear to be necessary, and if it was, she'd seen no evidence of sustenance in Helheim. So she focused her attention on escape. That meant she needed to get a sense of her prison's landscape. From what she'd been able to gather from the more experienced dead around her, she now dwelled in the world of Helheim, ruled by Queen Hel. Here, there was the queen's palace, the corpse gate, some perpetually frozen rivers, cold plains, and some rock formations, like the eroded bones of mountains. The corpse gate apparently went all the way around Helheim's border, posing a formidable obstacle. And there were also fearful mutterings about Hel's dog, a terrible hound named Garm who served to keep the dead inside bounds.
Actually, the existence of Garm comforted Lilly. If there was a need for a guard dog, then escape must be possible.
What Lilly needed, then, was a plan.
Cresting a ridge, she came to a wary halt. There was some commotion down below, angry shouting coming from the center of a knot in the crowd. What could possibly ignite people's pa.s.sions in Helheim? She jogged down the path from her ridge to investigate.
Pus.h.i.+ng through the mob, she found a towering, gaunt figure surrounded by people wielding sticks and stones. The man at the center of the crowd wore loose trousers tucked into boots of an archaic style, and his hip-length s.h.i.+rt opened at the collar to reveal a ring of deep purple bruises around his throat. Narrow cheekbones curved down to a pale-lipped mouth set in a sardonic smile. His shriveled eyes were nearly lost in dark hollows.
He was leaning on a tall, skinny tree branch, and Lilly realized he was blind.
”I tell you it's him,” said a man. ”He's the reason we're all here.”
”That's Judas?” said someone else, wearing modern jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt.
”Not Judas,” said the first man. ”It's Hod, the one who killed Baldr, on account of being a jealous dog-thanks to him, we're all cursed to rot in Helheim.”
The blind man shook his head and released a bored-sounding sigh.
Lilly had heard murmurings about Baldr-some kind of G.o.d or something-and that his murder many thousands of years ago had been some kind of watershed moment of cosmological something-or-other. All of it was so far removed from her that she didn't much care whether this Hod person was guilty or not of doing what the mob accused him of. But Lilly thought she knew scapegoating when she saw it, and when a baseball-size stone flew from the crowd and struck Hod in the temple, she couldn't stand by and do nothing.
As a man beside her moved to throw a rock of his own, Lilly grabbed his wrist and elbow and made him drop it. She swung him around to use as a s.h.i.+eld as she moved closer to Hod.
”Rather gotten yourself in the thick of things, eh?” Hod said.
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