How far above the plain?

"Only a squirrel’s length."

You mean your length?

"Of course. If the hole were at ground level there would be mud in here."

I see the light now. Excellent. You are without a doubt the finest of squirrels.

"Thank you," Ratatosk replied, sounding at once embarrassed and proud. He was such an agreeable fellow, and I smiled briefly at the top of his head before frowning at the light. The unavoidable problem of the Norns grew closer with every leap upward. I could not coach Ratatosk out of this; whatever he did, the Norns would foresee it. But now I feared that they truly shared my paranoia and that in their eagerness to attack me—the unseen, uncertain danger on Ratatosk’s back—they would willingly accept collateral damage, wounding both friend and foe. I did not want Ratatosk to come to harm, but neither did I want to have him stop; they would be prepared for such an event. As it stood, he was bringing me directly to them, where they could easily attack me astride the squirrel, flat against the trunk like a target. Bugger it all.

Ratatosk scurried out of the hole in the root and headed down the outside surface, and as soon as I saw the earth perhaps ten feet below, I unbound myself from his fur and leapt off, somersaulting in the air so as to land on my feet. A hoarse shouted curse and a flash of light startled me in midair, then I heard (and felt) Ratatosk scream as I landed, the sting of impact flaring in my ankles and knees. As the squirrel’s cries continued, I dropped and rolled to my right, expecting to be crushed underneath him as he fell from the tree. But that didn’t happen; his voice cut off abruptly, the bond between our minds snapped, and I glanced up to see naught but a flurry of ashes and bone fragments raining down from the place where he’d clung to the World Tree.

My mouth gaped and I think I might have whimpered. The Norns had obliterated him completely—a creature they’d known for centuries—because of me. It was like watching Rudolph get shot by Santa Claus.

Clearly, the Norns must have thought I represented a dire threat to act so rashly. I tore my eyes away from the horror and watched them warily, keeping still to maximize the effect of my camouflage.

They couldn’t see me. Their blazing yellow eyes, smoke curling from the sockets, were still fixed above my head on Ratatosk’s swirling remains. They were stooped hags with clawlike fingers, and their faces bore frenzied expressions that mothers warn their children not to make in case they freeze that way. Dressed in dirty gray rags that matched the greasy strings of hair falling from their scalps, they advanced carefully on the tree to make sure the danger they’d foreseen had passed.

It hadn’t.

It wasn’t long before they vocalized this. One of them tilted her head upon a wattled neck and said, “He is still here. The danger remains.”

Danger to whom? I hadn’t come to throw down with them. I just wanted some extremely rare produce. They all deserved a swift kick in the hoo-hah for what they had done to Ratatosk, but much as I wanted to deliver it, I didn’t see an upside to picking a fight with them when they could vaporize giant rodents. I took a step to my right, an overture to running away, but they must have spied the movement, for their heads all snapped down to lock directly on me with jaundiced, egg-yolk eyes.

“He is there!” the middle one cried, pointing, and then in unison they sang out in a truly ancient language and threw open their hands at me, their dirty fingernails releasing a foul dust into the air.

I didn’t know precisely what the dust was supposed to accomplish; most likely, it was my demise. Perhaps, in their old age and infirmity, they thought they were throwing confetti at me—but their behavior did not seem all that warm and welcoming. Rather the opposite, in fact. My cold iron amulet flashed hot for a second, confirming that they had just tried to kill me, and my stomach twisted oddly in my guts, causing me to fart robustly.

Normally I laugh at such things, because there is nothing like a fart to lighten up a tense situation. But this one hadn’t been a natural result of my digestion; it was a deadly serious fart, a sign that some small fraction of the Norns’ magic was getting past my amulet—perhaps a single speck of that dust—and that worried me.

“He’s still alive!” the one on the right cursed, and that dispelled any lingering doubts about their intentions.

I probably should have run for it. But then, if I escaped, they’d raise the alarm and all of Asgard would be searching for me. That wouldn’t end well. Strategically, logically, and even instinctively, in self-defense, I had to take them out. And once a decision like that is made in a moment of crisis, there is no such thing as calm, reasoned execution. There is only action, fueled by the baser parts of our brains.

The rags on the Norns’ bony frames were natural woolen fibers, and as such, lent themselves to easy manipulation. As the Norns shoved their claws into pockets for more dust and began to chant something different and more dire in their old tongue, I murmured a binding for the material at their shoulder blades, so that when I finished and willed it done, they were abruptly pulled back-to-back and held in place like a hissing human triangle. That disrupted their spell and caused some wailing and gnashing of teeth. I paused; I almost left them there, bound only by their clothes, seemingly impotent for now. But then abruptly they calmed down and began to rotate in a circle, chanting something low and venomous. Each Norn in turn faced me and pulled a thread from the front of her garment, passing it to her sister on the left. They began to weave the threads, pulling and twisting and chanting all the while as they spun. It was seven kinds of creepy, and I knew I couldn’t let them finish whatever they were doing, because it would likely finish me. I drew Moralltach and charged, not caring if they heard me. Their yellow eyes widened as they heard my approach, but they didn’t stop chanting their spell, so I couldn’t allow myself to stop either. I swept Moralltach through their necks in a single broad sweep, their heads sailed away like ragged balls of gray twine, and thus were the Norse unyoked from the chains of destiny. And thus was I plunged into a galactic vat of doom.

“Damn it!” I shouted, frustrated beyond belief at how badly this had played out. I released my binding and let the bodies slump as they may. I slumped to the ground after them, dragged down by the weight of what I’d just done.

When you steal an apple, you can simply disappear. That had been my plan. But slay a manifestation of fate, and “they will find you,” as Hans Gruber pointed out in Die Hard.

I chewed over the idea of aborting the mission. It had a nice light flavor to it, a piquant savor of surprise. I could try my hand at being unemployed in Greenland. Maybe that would keep me off the radar. Laksha would never find me there, I felt sure.

But the Norse probably would. And Oberon would be miserable. There was the bitter aftertaste.

Still, I had time to think of something better; I had until New Year’s to get the golden apple. Laksha wouldn’t start looking for me until then, and that would allow me to plan a thorough disappearance.

Except that then I would be running from both Laksha and the Norse. Whether I liked it or not, killing the Norns in self-defense made me an enemy of the whole pantheon. Stealing an apple at this point could hardly make it worse. That being the case, I decided to see the mission through and at least expunge my debt to Laksha.

I wiped Moralltach clean on one of the Norns’ gowns and resheathed it before squatting down and sinking my fingers through fallen leaves into the springy turf of Asgard, which was surprisingly akin to a moor—at least in the immediate vicinity of Yggdrasil. The Norns’ bodies had turned sickeningly black. I spoke to the earth through my tattoos and it acknowledged me, though it felt strained and far away, as if it had to struggle through a layer of cheesecloth. Obediently it parted to let the bodies of the Norns sink into its peaty depths, and obediently it closed again, leaving no trace of what had happened to them. That chore done, I scoured the earth around the base of the tree to find a few small remnants of Ratatosk, the finest of squirrels. I was glad I had left him feeling good about himself. I carefully placed the fragments of bone in a pouch attached to my belt. Later I would say words for him.

The Norns would be missed when the gods held their council in the morning, so I had until then to steal a golden apple and get out of Dodge. I couldn’t afford to linger, but I took a moment to look up at the towering trunk of Yggdrasil and fix in my memory my avenue of escape. Its size beggared the imagination; extending for miles in either direction, it gave the illusion of being an immense wooden wall rather than a cylinder. I assumed that there must be another hole in the trunk somewhere that Ratatosk used to access the root that led to Niflheim. A few minutes’ jog counterclockwise found it, and I noted that it looked a bit larger and more well used than the other one. Satisfied that I wouldn’t confuse the two holes and take the wrong exit home, I followed the directions Ratatosk had given me—not to Gladsheim but rather directly to Idunn’s hall. I ran west and slightly south toward the northernmost range of the Asgard Mountains, and if I got there after nightfall, which seemed likely, I could hope for Gullinbursti’s mane to act as a homing beacon. I leeched a wee bit of power from the earth with every step to keep myself fresh and tireless. I’d probably arrive there as Odin was working the gods into a froth over rumors of betrayal in Svartálfheim and invasion from a Roman god. I’d kicked the Norse anthill a good one, and now the gods would come spilling out, seeking something to bite.

Chapter 3

In many ways, I’m disappointed that Star Trek never became a religion. The archetypal skeleton was there, but they never strove to make it anything more than a TV show. If they’d capitalized on it, then its adherents would have orders from the nebulous gods of the Federation to explore new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before; the crew of the Enterprise could have been minor gods—angels, perhaps—guiding us through our personal frontiers on a daily basis. Spock could have been the angel of logic on your left shoulder, pointing out fallacious reasoning and suggesting courses of action based on mountains of evidence, while Kirk could have been the angel of emotion on your right shoulder, exhorting you to gird your loins, check your gut, and follow your instincts.

“Kill ’em all, Atticus,” imaginary Kirk said in my right ear. “One blow from Moralltach is all it takes. They can’t see you; it’ll be easy.”

“That would be unwise,” imaginary Spock said to the fragments of cartilage dangling on my left. A German witch had shot off most of my left ear three weeks ago, and while the healing was going better than the time a demon had chewed off my right one, it still didn’t look very good. “A better course of action would be to complete the mission stealthily. The probability of injury or death increases exponentially once your presence is discovered, coupled with time for the alarm to spread.”

Kirk kissed his self-control good-bye. “Damn it, Spock, we’re on a different plane of existence here, and sometimes you just have to say f**k it and let your balls swing heavy, free, and low. Right, Atticus? Kill ’em all! For Ratatosk!”

“Captain, our mission here is to purloin an apple that confers the vitality of youth to those who consume it, nothing more. Wholesale slaughter is neither advisable nor necessary.”

“What is it with you, Spock? Always prudence and caution and tiptoeing through the tulips. Don’t you have any stones in your Vulcan panties?”

“My reproductive organs are both present and in perfect working order, Captain, but that is hardly germane to our discussion. One cannot solve every problem through sheer machismo and violence.”

“Why not? It works for Chuck Norris.”

This is how I entertain myself when I have to run for hours and I can’t worry anymore about the ninety-nine ways I could die. I should have brought an iPod.

The moorish demesne of Yggdrasil gave way beneath my churning feet to the Plain of Idavoll, an impressive expanse of untamed grassland that hid plump pheasants, prairie voles, and sleek red foxes. Clouds hung like torn cotton in an achingly blue sky, and a late-autumn breeze blew scents of grass and earth in my face. It was a lovely day, but I could not enjoy it. A novice tracker could follow the trail I was leaving with little difficulty, and even though it was a planned tactic in the coming game of Seek and Destroy the Intruder, I couldn’t help but feel nervous about it.

I caught myself wishing that Scotty—the patron saint of all travelers?—could simply beam me across the plain to Idunn’s hall. Teleportation was his godlike power—that and getting his engines not only to warp speed, but to warp speed faster with nothing more than some auxiliary tubes and mysterious bypasses.

People used to think that Druids were capable of teleportation, but of course that’s nonsense. I’ve never disintegrated my atoms in one place and reassembled them in another. I have, however, run tirelessly for miles, as I was currently doing, faster than any normal man could huff and puff. And I’ve cheated by taking shortcuts through Tír na nÓg, where any grove can be bound to any Fae woodland on earth—Fae in the sense that it’s a healthy forest. Getting to Russia from Arizona took me less than five minutes: I shifted planes to Tír na nÓg, found the knots that led to a forest in Siberia like a railroad in my sight, then pulled myself along them until I was standing on the other side of the globe in the land of borscht and amusing furry hats. In order to make that shift, however, I’d had to get down to the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness from Tempe, and that had taken me nearly two hours. And once in Russia in a proper forest, it was a healthy three-hour trip overland to the high tundra lake bound to the Well of Mimir.

There were no shortcuts for me now. I’d have to run everywhere. But that, I came to decide, was not necessarily a bad thing. My longing for teleportation waned as I grew accustomed to the feel of the earth and the flow of magic beneath it. As far as ontological projections of human angst about the afterlife go, Asgard is one of the nicer ones. It is somewhat spare in its diversity of life, like the frozen lands the Norse hail from, but it is sharply rendered, redolent of mystery, and a bite of danger wafts about in the air.