Part 21 (2/2)

Vidar made a sound, a whistling gargle. His eye closed. Odin's eye remained open, seeing what Vidar no longer could.

HERMOD DIDN'T look away from Odin's eye until Mist gently took his forearm. ”Hermod, your hand-”

”I'm fine,” he said, too pained to laugh at the absurdity of his own a.s.sertion.

She cut away fabric from Vidar's s.h.i.+rt for a bandage and wrapped it around the bleeding stumps of Hermod's fingers.

”If Vidar's dead, does that mean we stopped Ragnarok?” she asked him.

Flames towered around them, feeding on the corpses. Black smoke boiled like oil in a cauldron, rising into the matte-black sky. Shadows crawled across the face of the sun. The fight was over, but the aftermath was eating the worlds. Killing Vidar had removed a domino, but it was as the sibyl said: The last one was still toppling.

Hermod could think of only one thing to do.

He bent over Vidar. With the thumb and index finger of his ruined hand, he plucked Odin's eye from Vidar's socket. It was apparently unattached by nerves or blood vessels or any connections of the flesh. But it was heavy with its own gravity.

”Hermod,” Mist said with alarm, ”you're not going to-”

Hermod reached up to his face with his good hand. He slipped a finger under his eyelid and grabbed his eyeball. The pain was already immense, but he pulled, screaming, the veins and arteries and optic nerve and muscle resisting, stretching, and he pulled until they ripped and snapped, ball-peen hammers and augers and metal screws driving into his head. To pa.s.s out now would be a waste, so he remained conscious. He plugged Odin's eye into his now-empty socket and screamed some more.

THE WORLD was a tree. Hermod had always known this, had even walked among its exposed roots, but now he saw the tree in its entirety. He towered before it as he had done before the toy mountain ranges at the bottom of Mimir's Well.

He saw how soil and crust and the ocean formed a thin skin over the tree's deeper substance, the living wood. The trunk was riddled with cracks, more seams than he'd ever imagined, some natural, some freshly cut. He saw the seams as clearly as lines drawn on a map, so tightly knotted that he could reach out his hand and watch it pa.s.s through three different worlds.

The roots of Jotunheim and Svartalfheim were burning in full conflagration. Alfheim and Niflheim and Nidavellir had collapsed into piles of ash. Helheim and Asgard were broken to chips and dust.

Flames licked at the edges of Midgard, growing hotter. Up the trunk, in a crook where the limbs branched out, was Vigrid, the battlefield where he now stood. Higher up still were more branches and other worlds, whose ident.i.ty and nature he didn't know. Above it all, the sun hung, glowing black with rot or a cancer. He followed the sticky black threads of rot to their source, a small sliver of the remains of Asgard: Frigg's home of Fensalir, and her closet of nothing.

There was a small part of the tree that had become separated from the rest. The terrain looked familiar-valleys and mountains of Alfheim that Hermod had once enjoyed hiking across but that now burned lifeless. On impulse, he reached out and took hold of the chunk of dead world and hung it in the sky.

”I just made a moon,” Hermod said to himself. It seemed easy.

He knew what he had to do now. He turned to Mist. Runes danced over her skin, like living tattoos. They were in his own hands, too, and in the blood seeping through his bandage. They were in Sleipnir's flanks, and in Vidar's body, and in the soil, and in the sky. The runes were everywhere, and they were very interesting. They wanted to tell him things. They wanted to reveal their secrets to him, and he wanted to stand there and read them forever.

But wisdom was knowing when to stop listening to the voices.

He sucked in a breath. Seeing how the worlds were arranged was one thing. Having the confidence to do the right thing with the Sword of Seven was completely another.

”Do whatever you're going to do without regret,” Mist said.

”Right.” He wanted to kiss her. Runes crawled over her lips, and he liked what they said. But there was no time.

He saw where the root of Midgard joined others. Then he raised the sword over his head and chopped down, through the wood, severing Midgard from the rest of the World Tree.

The ground dropped out beneath Hermod's feet, and then Midgard fell and fell, leaving the other worlds behind.

A WEEK LATER, when the tides receded, Mist and Hermod stood on the debris-strewn beach. Blocks of ice bobbed in the black sea, but the thaw was already noticeable. Sleipnir trotted in the surf, with Winston running behind him, nipping at his hooves.

Mist stepped back from the driftwood boat she'd built. It wasn't seaworthy, but it wouldn't have to sail far. ”What do you think?”

Hermod stared at it for a very long time. Then he looked at her with his mismatched eyes, Odin's gray iris glittering in the predawn light. He still spoke and acted like his old self, and he mostly looked the same-in need of a shave, and with his fingers wrapped in dirty bandages-but Hermod had changed.

”It's a good-looking funeral boat,” Hermod said. ”I think Grimnir would have liked it.”

They'd learned the details of Grimnir's fate from a Chinese Shaolin Einherjar, one of the few Einherjar who'd held on a while after the battle. He'd told them that Grimnir had died bravely, on his feet. He said that he'd have been happy with his ending.

Mist doused the boat with a can of lighter fluid. She wished she could give Grimnir a proper burial, but this would have to do. His body, like so much else, had been lost with the worlds of the World Tree Yggdrasil.

”I just hope it'll catch fire.”

”I'll make sure it does,” Hermod said, and Mist looked at him nervously.

”So, you're some kind of fire G.o.d now too?”

”What? No, I just mean I've got another can of lighter fluid in my bag that I stole from those looters. I figured it might come in handy.”

Mist smiled. Not everything had changed.

”Hush now,” she said, touching the flame of Grimnir's Zippo to the fuel-soaked wood. The fire did a weak ghost dance, and Mist feared the boat wouldn't catch. But then the flames took hold with surprising strength. Within a few moments, Grimnir's funeral s.h.i.+p blazed on the beach, sending up twirls of tiny orange stars. For the first time in longer than Mist could remember, she felt warm.

She held Hermod's hand and whispered part of a prayer she'd learned on her grandmother's lap: ”All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.”

”That's a good one,” Hermod said.

They remained on the beach until the waves came in. Cold seawater met the fire, and the boat breathed steam into the morning.

RIDING BEHIND Hermod on Sleipnir, Mist spotted a frost giant cowering in the shadows of an alley. She felt sorry for it and was glad when Hermod rode on without comment. Through the cracks that Almost-Ragnarok had wrought, giants and trolls and elves and dwarves and living dead had entered Midgard, and now that Hermod had cordoned the human world off from the rest of the dying universe, humankind would have to share their world with these refugees from faraway places.

News reports from across the globe were grim. Hundreds of thousands had died in battle and disaster, and more would die in its aftermath. But humanity had been facing war and famine and all manner of natural disaster since its very beginnings. Most had perceived Ragnarok as windstorm, hurricane, tsunami, and flood, as tremors that had torn earth apart and bled flame and magma. They had seen a monstrous serpent, or maybe it was just a tornado.

But many knew the truth. The veils had fallen, and they'd seen G.o.ds. This was not the first time. Man had known G.o.ds before but had forgotten them or consigned them to story. Maybe this time, with their footprints still in evidence, they wouldn't forget.

No, the world was not the same. But, Mist thought, looking up at the round lump of silver in the sky-Hermod's moon-at least it was still alive.

Mist and Hermod rode to a park in Pasadena, where Lilly and Hod and the Iowans had established a command center, from where they were organizing gra.s.s-roots relief efforts.

”Saint Lilly of the Molotov c.o.c.ktail, and her companion, Friar Grumpy,” Hermod said affectionately.

”They do sort of resemble a band of outlaw folk heroes, don't they?” Mist said, dismounting Sleipnir.

Lilly came over. ”Did you give Grimnir his grand send-off?”

”Not so grand,” Mist said, moving off with Lilly. ”But it was traditional. He would have liked that part of it.”

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