Part 13 (1/2)
Some dozen draugr were arranged as a guard around the tillerman, straining against chain leashes bolted onto the deck. They snarled and bit at the air like junkyard Dobermans.
Hod scratched his chin in thought. ”It might be harder than we thought to take control of the helm,” he whispered.
”Gee, you think?” Lilly hissed at him. If only Kathy and Grimnir and Hermod had made it on board, their presence might have been enough to carry the day. Lilly could only hope they'd managed to survive the flood.
”Layabouts!” It was the whip-cracking sailor with the hook in his eye. ”Didn't I order you gull-lovers to the oars? Thought you'd save your soft little hands from real labor?”
”You put us on the pumps,” Lilly protested.
His whip snapped inches from her face, biting off a piece of the railing. ”And I suppose I did that because I'm a dear pat of b.u.t.ter, wanting to make your miserable deaths easier. I suppose you think this hook goes all the way into my thinking brain? You don't like my thinking brain?”
”Just aim me in the right direction,” Hod muttered. ”I'll knock him right over the side.”
”Sir, I apologize for this misunderstanding,” Lilly said, forcing the words through gritted teeth. ”We'll get to the oars right away.”
Hookface slowly lowered the whip to his side. He smiled, making a faint sound as the hook grated against the bone of his eye socket. ”Indeed, you will not, for I've got a better plan for you. Our journey's sure to be no fish run, and we're like to be battered by wind and storm before it's through.”
He squinted up at the sail. Lilly followed his gaze. The broad expanse of cloth rippled and billowed in the wind, mottled with crudely st.i.tched patches of yellow and tan and brown.
It's skin, Lilly realized with a swell of nausea. They patch the sail with human skin.
”I'll have these two clapped in irons and brought to knife,” Hookface hollered. Men, whether dedicated crew or just press-ganged dead looking to curry favor with their overseers, came at Lilly and Hod.
Hod swooshed his stick around his head, smas.h.i.+ng attackers and shattering bones, while Lilly managed to throw two attackers overboard. But in the end there were too many of them, and they pressed in until Lilly was down on the deck beside Hod, unable to move and barely able to breathe. Peering between the legs of the man holding her down, she watched Hookface clomp over to her. He held out his hand, and someone pa.s.sed him a crude, bone-handled cleaver. The congealed blood on the blade was thick as jam.
He pressed the edge of the cleaver to Lilly's thigh, then yanked the hook out of his eye and placed the point near the cleaver's blade. ”Fork and knife,” he said, bursting into a coughing laugh. Then his single eye rolled up, showing the white, and he elevated into the air. Impaled, he wriggled on the end of a long pike, held aloft by the Jotun tillerman, who pointed an accusing finger at the men restraining Lilly and Hod.
”Enough of this horseplay,” he bellowed. ”We're on a schedule, if you please, and wind and current alone won't take us to Loki. Get on the oars, every one of you, before I mill you into flour for my biscuit. And as for you,” the giant said to Hookface, ”discipline begins at the top. You have to set an example for the men.” With that, he slammed the end of his pike on the deck as though planting a flag, and Hookface screamed.
The men scurried away.
”Now what?” Hod said, brus.h.i.+ng at his clothes.
Lilly fingered the hole in her jeans. ”To the oars,” she said. ”For now.”
She found Henry Verdant and Alice Kirkpatrick on a portside rowing bench.
”Where's your nephew?” she asked, taking a seat beside them.
Verdant shook his head and pulled on the oar.
”Draugr tore his head off,” Alice Kirkpatrick said.
Which meant that somewhere, Ike Verdant was a chewed-up disembodied head and fully aware of it. Lilly managed to suppress a shudder.
”I don't think our friends made it aboard,” Henry said, his back sagging under the labor of pulling the oar. ”Our whole operation might be a bust.”
”That's no kind of talk, Henry,” Alice said. ”You keep your spirits up, or I'll clock you over the head with this here paddle.”
Chastened, Henry almost smiled.
THE RIVER Gjoll opened onto a black sea, and the s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed out of Helheim. Where they'd come to, Lilly couldn't tell. She described the arrangement of stars in the sky to Hod, but it didn't help. ”All the maps have changed since I was last in the world,” he said.
Hookface remained atop the tillerman's pike. For a while a pair of ravens vexed him, landing on his shoulders and head and picking flesh from his ears. They stared down the deck with their glossy black eyes, and sometimes Lilly was sure they were staring at her.
THE s.h.i.+P slogged through dark caverns in the lower roots of the World Tree, her sail lying slack against the mast. Water fell from the cave ceiling in a steady, icy rain. The oars dipped into the black river, and the only other sounds were the crack of the overseers' whips and nails s.h.i.+vering against the hull.
Knives of pain gouged Lilly's back and shoulders as she pulled on the oar. Hod rowed beside her without complaint. In the yellow light of the lanterns, his face was strangely beautiful, the lines of his cheeks less severe, and the dark hollows of his eyes soothing. She supposed being a G.o.d of things dark and hidden meant that he was now in his natural place.
Hel's loyal dead paced the deck, brandis.h.i.+ng their weapons and growing more restless as the journey wore on. In her work as a professional agitator, Lilly had often found herself in similar situations, getting keyed up with anxiety and impatience. Soldiers in this state were dangerous, like springs too tightly coiled. Anything might set them off.
The subterranean river opened into a small lake with sharp geological formations rising from the water, and the Jotun tillerman steered the s.h.i.+p toward a precarious arrangement of three ma.s.sive, spade-shaped rocks. The order was given to s.h.i.+p the oars, and the tillerman let momentum carry Naglfar around to the other side of the little island.
A giant easily exceeding Naglfar's length lay bent backward over the rocks, a sharp point jutting into the small of his back. Blue ropes that looked like intestines secured him by wrist and ankle. The giant's skin was translucent, tinged with orange and yellow, as though fires burned beneath his flesh.
A woman equally as large knelt at his side. She might have been lovely once, but now bony wrists emerged from the sleeves of her threadbare gown as she held a cup over her companion's face. The cup caught oily venom that dripped from the fangs of a serpent coiled around a ma.s.sive stalact.i.te above them.
”I must empty the cup now,” said the giantess.
The giant's face screwed up in pain and anger. ”You lie! You always lie! It can't possibly be full yet!”
She peered into the cup. ”But it is, husband. It nearly brims with venom. I shall be but a moment.”
”No! Don't-”
She rose slowly and leaned off the edge of the rocks to overturn the cup. Venom oozed out in sticky strands. Meanwhile, the bound giant howled as venom from the serpent's fangs fell into his face. He bucked and thrashed, sending tremors through the rocks. Waves smashed against the s.h.i.+p's hull.
”Curse you, b.i.t.c.h! You do this on purpose! Curse you to torment for all eternity!”
”It is already so, my dear husband,” the giantess said placidly.
The overseers and the armed men watched the scene play out with expressions of uncertainty. Even the Jotun tillerman, standing now at the s.h.i.+p's rail, seemed disquieted.
”I know that voice,” Hod whispered. ”That's Loki.”
”Oh, look,” the giantess said. ”My cup is full again.”
”That's impossible! You can't have caught more than three drops!”
Lilly was inclined to agree. The venom fell slowly, and the cup was the size of a wine barrel, but the giantess once again left her husband's side to empty the cup. Loki watched in wide-eyed horror as a bead of venom formed on one of the serpent's fangs and stretched in a long string down to his cheek. He arched his back and bucked when it made contact. Rocks shook loose from the cavern ceiling. On the s.h.i.+p, the armed men took shelter under their s.h.i.+elds, but the rowers were defenseless. A cantaloupe-size boulder smashed the skull of a man two benches in front of Lilly.
”The cup!” Loki shrieked. ”Bring back the cup!”
”It is emptying,” the giantess a.s.sured him, staring into the cup's depths.
”It hurts!”
”I know, my sweet candle, I know. Best not to dwell. Tell me a tale to take your mind off it. One of your funny stories, perhaps about how you changed yourself into a mare to mate with a stallion and gave birth to eight-legged Sleipnir. Or how you disguised yourself as an old woman and tricked Hod into killing Baldr with a mistletoe spear, thus ensuring the death of all that lives in the nine worlds, including, of course, myself. That one is so funny. You are so funny, my husband.”