Sleipnir

Beneath the trappings of glory and drinking and whoring it up, the old Viking religion was damned vicious. Three old hags called the Norns made all the rules—including the ones the gods themselves lived by. These three witches made the Greek Fates look like Sleeping Beauty's Good Fairies. Their rules for living—and dying—were ugly, cruel, full of blood and torture and death. Nobody, including Odin, spat without those three old hags' by-your-leave, and nobody broke the rules.

Warriors—those who died in battle—and accident victims did not share the same afterlife. Not ever. And yet there Odin was, apparently throwing everybody into one stewpot, willy-nilly. Odin wasn't allowed to collect victims of accidents—or disease, or old age—for his great battle hall. But he'd collected Gary. And apparently the Norns were letting him get away with it.

That had left me with two possibilities. Either the army had lied about the accident—which was not only entirely possible, but highly probable, if ragheads had been involved—or something really screwy was going on here. Why would Odin start stealing men wherever he found them? And why would the Norns let him?

To answer my first question, I'd collared Hill, the driver, and Rosetti—separately—and had done my best (or worst, depending on your viewpoint) to get the real story out of them. They had agreed on every detail. Gary had died in a plain-and-simple truck wreck. No raghead ambush, no sabotage of the truck, no nothing. Just one blind-drunk muther at the wheel and one dead GI. I think they had to rehospitalize Hill after I got done with him... .

Meanwhile, Odin had gotten away with murder. And probably would again—maybe even mine. I bitterly acknowledged that fact, and, somewhere in the process of getting drunk and ripping up a German bar and a few dozen of the Palestinian "Turks" who hung out there, I felt like I finally understood why Oedipus—who had also fallen afoul of a divine joke too cruel to bear—had stabbed out his own eyes.

And then, quietly and clear-headedly, I had vowed that Odin would pay. No matter what it took. Which left me with figuring out how. A mortal doesn't just hop a bus for the home of the gods... .

Not even dying was a surefire way to get to him. Most of the dead went to the goddess Hel's hall in Niflheim, and a full half the warriors killed in battle were claimed by Freyja for her hall, wherever that was. Besides, I didn't want to die first just in order to get to Odin. Dead men don't get much done, and I had a lot to accomplish.

The only reliable way to get to Odin without dying was to cross the rainbow bridge Bifrost, into Asgard. Problem was, it bypassed Earth without stopping. Besides, no mortal could cross it anyway; it was too fragile. I had to come up with another way to get to Odin.

A really convoluted, arguably crazy way.

According to the old stories, a man could find his way into the underworld—without dying first—by locating a very deep cave, and following it down to the echoing bridge that led from Earth into Niflheim, the "underworld"—not precisely hell (since that was called Niflhel); but certainly not heaven, either.

The old stories also said that Loki was chained in the underworld as punishment for killing Baldr, Odin's favorite son. He would remain there until the twilight of the gods and their final battle at Ragnarok.

Sleipnir—through a biologically improbable series of events—was Loki's son.

And Sleipnir—bless his big black heart—was the only creature in the combined nine worlds able to cross between any two of them at will.

Voila: All I had to do was catch Sleipnir and ride him to Asgard. Once I got Odin within arm's reach, I would wring his cursed neck for him. Piece of cake. Always assuming a human being could kill a god, of course... .

The one thing I couldn't do was just sit and do nothing. I had to believe one man could change what was happening, because to believe in predestination—that everything was fixed and immutable, that nothing you did meant spit in the long run—was to believe that Gary and I, the rest of humanity, everything we'd accomplished as a species was worth nothing. It meant we hadn't done anything more meaningful than run headlong down Somebody's elaborate rat maze. I wouldn't buy that.

I might be an asshole; but I sure as hell wasn't a rat.

The gods were mortal, after a fashion. They were all slated to die at Ragnarok. If everything were foreordained, and ran according to rules as immutable as the physics that governed nuclear fission, then Fenrir would kill Odin, Thor would die of poison blown by the Midgard serpent, and traffic-accident victims would always end up in Niflheim, not Sleipnir's teeth.

But if everything weren't foreordained...

I didn't know if I could kill a god; but I knew I had to try. If he could snatch victims from insignificant traffic accidents, who could guess what bigger and better "accidents" he might arrange? It wouldn't take much meddling to blow the lid off the uneasy peace we had going at the moment. That would sure as hell give him a steady supply of bodies. He had to be stopped; and there just wasn't anybody else I could think of in any position to stop him.

The Norns—hiding under the roots of the world tree, where the great rainbow bridge spa

I didn't much care.

I was not only going to break the rules, I was going to play another game altogether. Which left me waist-deep in a freezing river somewhere in the middle of a Norwegian mountain.

I don't know how long I slogged through the cold water, putting one booted foot carefully ahead of the other and forcing my shivering body to keep moving. My watch had tritium-coated hands and numbers, which meant I could see them even without the carbide light; but my brain wouldn't register the time properly. I knew I had to get out of the water soon or I would freeze to death.

Unfortunately there was no end to the river in sight. The walls began to narrow down again, causing the current to pick up. My legs were so numb I was having trouble keeping my footing, and the only thing that saved me from falling a couple of times was grabbing for the walls. The rough stone cut my hands, so I braced myself long enough to dig a pair of wet gloves out of my butt pack. They were cold and soaked; but saved the skin of my palms several times during the next few minutes.

I was shivering so hard now, it was a race between the numbness and convulsions as to which would dunk me in the end—

My footing disappeared without warning. I dropped off a shelf and floundered, choking with icy water up my nose. The weight of the pack dragged me under. My waterlogged boots hampered my efforts to kick toward the surface. I flailed desperately and managed to get my face above water long enough to gasp.

I stared wildly into utter blackness. Not only had the carbide lamp hissed and gone out instantly; but the current had dragged my helmet away into the darkness, gone before I could even think of grabbing for it.

A low rumble grew ominously in my ears. The current—which had picked up sharply—dragged me mercilessly along. Blind, half frozen, I flailed both arms, and scraped my hand against the wall. I tried to grab hold; but only managed to scrape up my arm without finding purchase. Kicking hard slewed me sideways in the heavy current, then smacked me hard into the wall, sooner than I expected. I tried again to grab hold, scrabbling with hands and feet.

The roar grew louder and the current picked up more speed. Try as I might, the river scraped me along the wall (leaving bits of cloth and skin behind) toward a dropoff—a cliff, or chimney, no doubt—which certainly lay ahead. When my feet bumped into something, it took my brain a couple of seconds to register the impact.