Part 18 (2/2)
Guards.
And what, Mist wondered, were they guarding?
Before her ran two rows of pens at least the length of a football field, with a corridor between them. She stepped deeper into the vast room. In one pen, a gorgeous chestnut foal lay motionless on a bed of straw. In another, three leopard cubs cuddled in a heap, absolutely still. They didn't look dead. They looked switched off.
All the pens housed inert babies. It was a veritable zoo of them. In one of the pens, the babies were human.
A noise at her back, and Mist spun around.
”Oh, hey, it's you,” Hermod said. His right arm hung in a sling, and his face was clean, the bruises from the drubbing Vidar had given him faded. Winston wagged his tail at Hermod's side. ”We have to get out of here. This is my mother's house.”
”I know,” Mist said. ”I met her.”
His eyes widened. ”Did she do anything to you?”
”She gave me a bath and did my laundry.”
”That's just like her.”
Mist handed him his duffel. ”Careful with this. Vidar's sword is inside.”
Hermod grimaced as he took the bag from her.
They hurried between the pens, looking for a way out of the stable that didn't involve going back into the heavily trafficked corridor. Winston ran ahead and sniffed the door on the far end of the stable. He barked impatiently.
Hermod pushed the door open a crack and issued a low whistle.
”What is it?”
He opened the door wider and stepped through. Mist followed him into a cavernous room of maps and drawings and saw what had impressed him. In green ink, drawn directly on the walls and on the floor and on the ceiling, was a depiction of a world gone mad with life: a naked man and a woman provided scale, dwarfed by forty-foot blades of gra.s.s and daisies the size of roller-coaster loops. Jumbo-jet dragonflies buzzed through the air between flies and moths and bees the size of Volkswagens. Trees soared above, vanis.h.i.+ng in foreshortened perspective. Behemoth melons sprung from the ground. There were seas too, packed with a dizzying array of fish and whales and squid and snails and forests of kelp.
Written over the whole of it in a precise hand were runes that Mist didn't know and geometric patterns that suggested a crossbreeding of abstract art and an attempt to ill.u.s.trate s.p.a.ce-time.
”I think this is Frigg's blueprint,” Hermod said. ”This is what she wants built in the aftermath. And those animals in the pens are like a DNA repository to populate her new world.”
”Too bad the current world has to meet the wrecking ball first.”
Hermod shrugged. ”I guess there are worse reasons to destroy everybody and everything.”
”But if she and Vidar are acting to artificially encourage Ragnarok, then there should be something we can do to halt it.”
”It stands to reason. Except we're so far out of our league. Frigg's ability to manipulate the very substance of the universe is unequaled. She proved that a long time ago, with her spell to protect Baldr.”
”But she's not invincible,” Mist insisted. ”After all, Baldr did die.”
”Only because Frigg wanted him to. She intentionally left a loophole by neglecting to get an oath from mistletoe. Then she had Loki exploit that loophole to trick Hod into killing Baldr.”
Mist shook her head as she walked down the length of the wall, awestruck not so much by Frigg's power as by her thoroughness. She'd suborned Vidar and Loki. She'd arranged the murder of Baldr and set Hod up as the fall guy. She'd taken steps to see to it that her influence would be perpetuated in the new world to follow Ragnarok. And what sickened Mist most of all was that Frigg was no doubt comfortable in the thought that all this was being done for a greater good.
Not all the drawings were gargantuan versions of familiar life forms. There were also terrestrial creatures that looked like jellyfish with fur, and glowing globes with corkscrew tails, and things that looked like mounds of baby bunnies, only with more eyes. Frigg's Earth 2.0 would be fecund and strange.
Mist was gaping at a many-torsoed centaurlike animal and almost missed noticing the door it was drawn upon. What manner of creatures would she find on the other side, she wondered? With her hand on the pommel of her saber, she cracked open the door.
Vast darkness lay beyond the threshold, like an endlessly deep hole in all directions. Though Mist braced herself against the doorjamb, the emptiness pulled her in. Her grip slipped and she flew forward, nothing below her feet, air rus.h.i.+ng out of her lungs, like an astronaut blown through an airlock into s.p.a.ce. She felt the atomic bonds of her body break apart into disconnected particles as her thoughts lost clarity and shattered like a mirror. With her last shred of unraveling awareness, she perceived a kind of revelation, an understanding of the true absence that had existed before the creation of the universe. This was the wisdom of G.o.ds.
And then Hermod was beside her, falling into the vortex, and she decided, no, they would not lose to Frigg this way. They would not be disappeared. She threw herself back and, with a silent cry of effort, slammed the door shut. She sank to her knees and clutched Hermod.
”Hey, careful,” Hermod whispered. ”We almost fell there.”
It was moments before Mist could speak again. ”There's nothing on the other side,” she said, s.h.i.+vering.
”I know. That's why you need to be careful.”
”I mean there's nothing. Not like there's not anything, but like ... Oh, holy s.h.i.+t. There's nothing on the other side.” She clutched him tight, desperate to feel his comforting solidity.
”I know,” he said, rubbing warmth into her shoulders. ”We've almost fallen inside monster wolves. There's some of that nothing inside them. Or they're like a portal to nothing. It's upsetting, I know.”
She and Hermod held on to each other.
”There's nothing in Vidar's sword too,” squawked a voice. Mist turned to see a pair of ravens hopping on the floor.
”That was a close shave,” one of them said. ”If you hadn't caught yourselves before you fell in, you'd have been so completely erased that no one would have even remembered you'd ever existed. Because, well, you'd have never existed.”
”I would have remembered,” said the other raven. ”I've got a mind like a steel trap. And I'm talking about dwarf steel. A lot of people think elf steel is the best steel there is, but in terms of hardness, elasticity, ductility, tensile strength, and uncanniness, you really can't beat dwarf steel.”
”Also, Munin and I have the advantage of being partly made of nothing ourselves,” said the first. ”We're a bit like Vidar's sword in that sense. It's made of seven impossible things, the seventh being nothing. Nothing is great stuff. Nothing cuts through anything.”
”Talking birds?” Mist asked Hermod.
”Hugin and Munin. Thought and Memory. Another source of Odin's wisdom,” Hermod said. He made quotation-mark gestures with his fingers when he said ”wisdom.”
Mist's head felt empty, her body bloodless. ”Terrific. Maybe they can tell us this: Why does Frigg have a room full of nothing?”
Hugin c.o.c.ked his head sideways. ”All the something she's planning to build has to go somewhere. And you don't think she'll be content to make a single new world, do you? Or even nine? She'll be making hundreds of worlds, thousands, all teeming with life. It's selfish, in a way, you trying to stop her, putting the needs of you and your sad little dying worlds ahead of the endless possibility of the new.”
”It wouldn't bother me so much if there weren't already people living on the old ones,” Mist shot back.
”Don't let the bird bait you,” Hermod said. ”The ravens don't want Ragnarok to happen any more than we do. They may be hyperniscient pests, but they want to live, and ours is the universe they live in. If it gets flushed away, they go with it, just like the rest of us.”
Munin pecked at a drawing of a fat worm on the wall, but Hugin grew still, fixing Hermod with his black mirror eyes.
”Losing possession of the Sword of Seven was not a good move on Vidar's part,” the raven said. ”Because the sword cuts through anything, it can be used to make new seams in the World Tree. Vidar needs the sword to make sure that the destruction of one world will spill over into the others. It's like a domino effect, but for one domino to topple the others, the barriers between the dominoes have to be removed. Odin's eye is what shows Vidar where to make the cuts, to slice those barriers out of the way.”
”So Vidar's got the eye,” Mist said, ”but we've got the sword. As long as Vidar doesn't have both, we're okay?”
”Vidar's not that stupid,” Hugin said. ”The nothing in the Sword of Seven is a tricky substance to work with, but there's no shortage of nothing.”
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