Sleipnir

Which only made sense. Niflheim had to lie farther down. And the knife was tugging insistently on my boot, urging movement in that direction. So I turned to my left, and noticed that the darkness wasn't quite as intense lower in the tu

All right.

I hauled myself to my feet, grabbed hold of the wall, and took an exploratory step.

Moving downhill proved almost as impossible as struggling uphill, with one notable exception. I quickly discovered that shuffling worked better than striding or even gingerly mincing along, a fact I discovered only after slipping and riding on my ass down a sixty-degree rock slide for nearly thirty feet.

That was the unhappy exception. I could always slide into Niflheim, so long as I didn't mind being slashed to ribbons by the time I got there. The whole floor was carpeted with stone chips, boot-lace deep in places, and each one was as sharp as an obsidian scalpel. My butt pack and trousers were slashed all to hell by the time I managed to stop that first wild skid. At this rate, I'd be bare-ass naked by the time I found Sleipnir.

I stuck closer to the walls after that, where the chips were shallower than out toward the center. The walls were nearly smooth under my hands. There was no noticeable variation in the angle of either the floor or the walls. I was moving down a near-perfectly straight, sharply angled chute through the heart of a mountain.

What were the odds against such a tu

I supposed volcanic action might account for it; but I wasn't sure if there'd ever been volcanic activity around here. I wasn't a physicist, and certainly not a geologist, and I was far too exhausted to figure any of it out even if I'd had relevant data. At this point I was lucky to add two and two and come out with four.

—Hell, in this cave, twenty-two might be the correct answer.

The tu

Who'd said Hell was murky? Probably Miss Wilkes, from sophomore English.

At least, it sounded like something she might've said.

Fifteen minutes later I could actually see the wall. It didn't look hewn or cut by any method I'd ever heard of; but it was straight as you please, and there was hardly a bump or snag anywhere. I stood still long enough to catch my breath and ease leg cramps; then pushed on, my curiosity building even more rapidly than the light.

A short time later a wide black crack appeared. Another fissure; only this one ran vertically, whereas mine had snaked in horizontally. I stood still and rested my hand on the smooth edge. I was aware that I was incredibly lucky to be out of that fissure alive.

Glancing back briefly, I saw more flashes of light. Blue, yellow; then darkness. I shrugged and started to turn away when a new set of flashes appeared, brighter than the others. The air began to vibrate, as with a half-sensed thunderstorm still out of sight over the horizon.

Bemused, I stood transfixed. The lights teased my retinas, dancing, swaying, flaring steadily brighter, while the air beat at my eardrums. Even when my ears popped it wasn't enough to cope with the rapidly building overpressure. The lights were a kaleidoscope gone mad, shifting down the long dark tu

The back of my brain whispered a warning to the front, and an urgent tugging at my calf clamored for attention; but I wasn't listening. What the blazes could it be? Landslide? Earthquake? Volcanic eruption? No, that'd have to come from below, not above. Wouldn't it?

I stood there beside the fissure with my mouth hanging open, staring as the flood of lights and noise rushed at me out of the darkness, and didn't have the sense to get out of the way. My ears popped again and a freight train noise roared in my ears, its thunder shaking the very walls. My teeth rattled and I squinted against brilliant light. It leaped off the floor as high as my head, showering in fountains and spurts like molten steel.

With the air a solid wall of sound beating at me, instinct finally took over and shoved me into the fissure, bruising ribs and tearing open my injured back and knees again. I yelled and heard nothing but the roar permeating the rocks. I found myself panting as terror took hold. Then I forced myself to face whatever it was that was sweeping down the cave.

Thunder hurt my skull. Stone chips stung my face.

Then I saw the eyes.

Thunder, lights, cave—all vanished into an ice-filled night, with those eyes gouging my soul as they hunted fresh prey... .

Thunder crashed back into my awareness. The bottom dropped out of the air pressure as Sleipnir tore past. Every footfall struck explosions of sparks. I stuck my head completely into the open, staring, while the wind sucked air out of my lungs.

He was immense; yet he was out of sight almost immediately, disappearing into the gloom downslope. The thunder gradually receded and the flying sparks vanished with it. When the wind of his passage finally died away, I took a long, deep breath and released it slowly.

Well...

The cave's ceiling had to be at least two hundred feet high, didn't it? Then I snorted. That was a stupid, irrelevant thought, for damned sure.

I chewed my upper lip thoughtfully, gazing down the tu

I looked back up that impossible tu

Briefly I wondered where the fissure into which I was now jammed might lead; then decided I didn't care. There were nine worlds altogether, and not all of them were friendly to human life. Hell, some weren't even on speaking terms with the gods.

I glanced back up Sleipnir's great tu

The chill deepened and I shook myself vigorously. It didn't bear thinking about. Besides, for a dead man, I hurt in a hell of a lot of places. I watched another light flicker into life at the top of the tu

Sleipnir was waiting.