Part 12 (2/2)
Mist couldn't think of anything to say to that.
”So,” the man said again, ”what befell you?”
”I was a murder victim.”
He murmured his sympathy.
”Do you know why they need so many of us?” Mist asked him. ”With Hel's troops already in place-”
”Her fighters are for fighting. But Naglfar needs bodies at the oars. That's where we shall be forced to serve.”
The Iowans reached the boarding ramp and walked up to the rail, where a particularly beefy pair of dead fellows was stopping people for inspection before letting them on the s.h.i.+p. It was hard to tell by what criteria they were judging, but after a nervous few moments, Verdant, Ike, and Alice Kirkpatrick were given nods of permission, and they boarded without incident. Hod and Lilly climbed the ramp after them and were also let on board. But when Hermod tried to follow, one of the dead fellows put a hand on his chest.
”What do you think you're doing?”
”Getting set to sail,” Hermod said jauntily.
Two more large men approached. Even dead, they projected an air of officious thuggery.
Squeezing past the dead separating her from Hermod and Grimnir, Mist hoped neither of them would do something stupid or impulsive. She looked up nervously at the s.h.i.+p. Having boarded, Lilly and Hod were no longer in sight.
One of the men leaned over Hermod and sniffed. ”You smell funny,” he said, wrinkling his nose. ”You smell alive.”
”I a.s.sure you, I'm quite dead,” Hermod lied with indignation.
The man motioned the other guards closer. ”What do you guys think?”
They all flared their nostrils, except for one of them, who had no nose and presumably admitted Hermod's life-affirming fumes through his exposed nasal cavity.
”Alive,” p.r.o.nounced the noseless one, and all the guards made noises of agreement.
The boarding of Naglfar had come to a stop, and Mist felt the press of the dead building up behind her. The decapitated man kept nudging her with his strap-on head. Mist elbowed him back and reached for her sword.
”We should go,” Grimnir whispered to her.
”And leave Lilly and the others? No.”
”We can't do them much good if we get ripped limb from limb,” he retorted, but before Mist could formulate a response, an eerie, multivoiced, growling moan came from the s.h.i.+p.
”Draugr,” Hermod yelled. He bear-hugged Mist and leaped off the ramp, absorbing the impact of landing with his own body. Grimnir and Winston dropped next to them.
The draugr came spilling over the s.h.i.+p's rail, clawing and gnas.h.i.+ng at the dead scrambling to get out of their way. They bit the slower ones, tore their throats, plucked out eyes. Hermod doubted this was part of some planned attack. More likely, Hel's forces had simply lost control of their zombies. That was the problem with draugr: They made for a fearsome force, but they could just as easily turn on their commanders.
Mist madly swung her blade, but despite her efforts to scythe through all comers, the draugr kept pressing in closer, climbing over one another to snap their teeth near her face and reach in with raking fingers. Hands grasped her wrists, immobilizing her sword arm, but then Winston was there, biting her a.s.sailant's leg to pull the draugr off.
Mist struggled to make her way back up the ramp, to the s.h.i.+p, to help Lilly with whatever she was facing on board, but the crush of bodies boiling around her drew her farther away.
Then came a freight-train roar that gave even the draugr pause, and Mist glanced upriver to see a wall of water rus.h.i.+ng forward, jumbled with chunks of ice and uprooted trees and tumbling dead. The wave slammed into her, smas.h.i.+ng her breath away and lifting her up in a swell of water and debris. Rolling in the turbulence, her body cracked against tree limbs, against rocks and the bodies of the dead. As she struggled to stay on the surface, the current took her along the length of the s.h.i.+p and past it.
The s.h.i.+p strained against its mooring lines until they snapped, whipping around and striking dead, slicing them to pieces. The great sail billowed out, and the fingernails covering the hull clicked and clacked like a colony of scuttling crabs.
Naglfar set sail.
Mist fell beneath the current, dirt forcing its way into her tightly shut eyes. Her head collided so hard with some object that she was sure her skull would shatter like a flowerpot. Crushed, buried, battered.
The water popped her back to the top, and a hand grasped her flailing arm and pulled her onto a floating tree trunk. She lay there on her stomach, choking on water and mud. She was only dimly aware when somebody rolled her onto her side and pounded between her shoulder blades. After a while she was able to draw air into her tortured lungs. Some time later, she realized it was Hermod who was helping her. He cleaned out her eyes as best he could with water from his canteen.
They clung to the tree, carried by the floodwaters. Grimnir crouched down at one end, like the lookout on a s.h.i.+p's prow, while a miserable-looking Winston shook water and muck from his fur.
”What happened?” Mist managed to wheeze out.
”The prophecy says when the Midgard serpent stirs, Naglfar will set sail on the floodwaters,” Hermod said, gazing upriver. ”Guess the serpent's alarm clock went off.”
”Lilly and Hod? The Iowans?”
”On their own now,” Hermod said, daubing her forehead. Apparently she was bleeding. He patted her right leg, moving down from thigh to ankle, and then the left one. ”Checking for broken bones,” he explained, sounding defensive, when he caught a look from Grimnir. With a strip of cloth from his jacket, he buddy-taped her ring finger and pinky together.
”Guys, you wanna look at this?” Grimnir pointed ahead, but the gesture was unnecessary. The sky before them was a kaleidoscopic storm. Other worlds were visible in brief flashes through the fragments: enormous pines, mountains of frost, stalagmite-encrusted caverns, skysc.r.a.pers with snowdrifts piling up to the fifth floors.
”World's breaking apart,” said Hermod. ”I think this might be it.”
The river spiraled into the crazy quilt, and Mist and Hermod clutched each other as the tree trunk rushed on.
LILLY CAST HER gaze down Naglfar's long deck but, except for Hod, she saw no sign of her companions, lost in the chaos of the draugr skirmish on the riverbank. As Hel's troops struggled to leash the remaining loose draugr, Lilly tried to calm herself and get a grip on their tactical situation.
Hel's soldiers were well equipped: men in bronze helmets and ostrich plumes, a Confederate side by side with a Union soldier, a n.a.z.i SS officer, and others dressed and outfitted in ways it would have taken a military historian to identify. Even if Lilly and Hod could find the Iowans, they had no chance of taking the s.h.i.+p.
A whip cracked over Lilly's head, and a man in a black wool peacoat stepped forward. His face was a mangled mess of welts, a rusty cargo hook embedded in his right eye. ”All right, you worthless dead, man your posts. Malingerers get flayed and turned into sailcloth. You two,” he barked, glaring at Lilly with his one good eye. ”Why are you just standing there? Looking to get run up the mast?”
”We just boarded, sir,” Lilly said, managing a reasonable tone of voice. ”What are our posts, please?”
”The pumps,” the man cried, gesticulating in any number of directions. ”D'you think I want to sail all the way to Midgard with a cursed slurry 'round my ankles? Man the pumps or I'll have you as my own ration!”
”Aye, sir,” Lilly said crisply, and she gripped Hod's arm and retreated as quickly as she could.
The other press-ganged crew members seemed no more sure of their a.s.signed positions than did Lilly and Hod, and they gained little sympathy from the officers, who cracked their whips and struck any sailor unlucky enough to come within range.
Lilly hurried over to the pumps, devices fas.h.i.+oned from pelvic bones, and bent to the work.
”Who's at the helm?” Hod asked, close to her ear.
Lilly described the creature standing at the stern. Struggling to hold the tiller steady, he or she or it stood at least twenty feet tall, bulging with slabs of muscle, its head wreathed in thick, kelplike ropes of hair. Its bare chest was laid open, revealing ribs and lungs and a heart like a deflated football.
”A dead Jotun,” Hod said. ”A giant.”
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