The Hammer of Thor Page 14

  It took a moment for my hands to remember how to sign. Your parents made these for you?

  Rules, he repeated. His face gave away little. I started to wonder if, earlier in his life, Hearthstone had smiled more, cried more, shown any emotion more. Maybe he’d learned to be so careful with his expressions as a defense.

  “But why the prices?” I asked. “It’s like a menu….”

  I stared at the gold coins glittering on the fur rug. “Wait, the coins were your allowance? Or…your payment? Why throw them on the rug?”

  Inge stood quietly in the doorway, her face lowered. “It’s the hide of the beast,” she said, also signing the words. “The one that killed his brother.”

  My mouth tasted like rust. “Andiron?”

  Inge nodded. She glanced behind her, probably worried that the master would appear out of nowhere. “It happened when Andiron was seven and Hearthstone was eight.” As she spoke, she signed almost as fluently as Hearth, like she’d been practicing for years. “They were playing in the woods behind the house. There’s an old well…” She hesitated, looking at Hearthstone for permission to say more.

  Hearthstone shuddered.

  Andiron loved the well, he signed. He thought it granted wishes. But there was a bad spirit….

  He made a strange combination of signs: three fingers at the mouth—a W for water; then pointing down—the symbol for a well; then a V over one eye—the sign for taking a pee. (We used that one a lot on the streets, too.) Together, it looked like he was naming this bad spirit Pees-in-the-Well.

  I frowned at Inge. “Did he just say—?”

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “That is the spirit’s name. In the old language, it is called a brunnmigi. It came out of the well and attacked Andiron in the form of…that. A large bluish creature, a mixture of bear and wolf.”

  Always with the blue wolves. I hated them.

  “It killed Andiron,” I summed up.

  In the fluorescent light, Hearthstone’s face looked as petrified as Blitzen’s. I was playing with some stones, he signed. My back was turned. I didn’t hear. I couldn’t…

  He grasped at empty air.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Hearth,” Inge said.

  She looked so young with her clear blue eyes, her slightly pudgy rosy cheeks, her blond hair curling around the edges of her bonnet, but she spoke as if she’d seen the attack firsthand.

  “Were you there?” I asked.

  She blushed even more. “Not exactly. I was just a little girl, but my mother worked as Mr. Alderman’s servant. I—I remember Hearthstone running into the house crying, signing for help. He and Mr. Alderman rushed out again. And then, later…Mr. Alderman came back, carrying Master Andiron’s body.”

  Her cow tail flicked, brushing the doorjamb. “Mr. Alderman killed the brunnmigi, but he made Hearthstone…skin the creature, all by himself. Hearthstone wasn’t allowed back inside until the job was done. Once the hide was cured and made into a rug, they put it in here.”

  “Gods.” I paced the room. I tried to wipe some of the words off a whiteboard, but they were written in permanent marker. Of course they were.

  “And the coins?” I asked. “The menu items?”

  My voice came out harsher than I’d intended. Inge flinched.

  “Hearthstone’s wergild,” she said. “The blood debt for his brother’s death.”

  Cover the rug, Hearthstone signed mechanically, as if quoting something he’d heard a million times. Earn gold coins until not a single hair can be seen. Then I have paid.

  I looked at the list of prices—the pluses and minuses of Hearthstone’s guilt ledger. I stared at the sprinkling of coins lost in an expanse of blue fur. I imagined eight-year-old Hearthstone trying to earn enough money to cover even the smallest portion of this huge rug.

  I shivered, but I couldn’t shake off my anger. “Hearth, I thought your parents beat you or something. This is worse.”

  Inge wrung her hands. “Oh, no, sir, beatings are only for the house staff. But you are right. Mr. Hearthstone’s punishment has been much more difficult.”

  Beatings. Inge mentioned them as if they were unfortunate facts of life, like burned cookies or stopped-up sinks.

  “I’m going to tear this place down,” I decided. “I’m going to throw your father—”

  Hearthstone locked eyes with me. My anger backwashed in my throat. This wasn’t my call. This wasn’t my history. Still…

  “Hearth, we can’t play his sick little game,” I said. “He wants you to complete this wergild before he helps us? That’s impossible! Sam’s supposed to marry a giant in four days. Can’t we just take the stone? Travel to another world before Alderman realizes?”

  Hearth shook his head. Stone must be a gift. Only works if given freely.

  “And there are guards,” Inge added. “Security spirits that…you don’t want to meet.”

  I’d expected all of the above, but that didn’t stop me from cursing until Inge’s ears blushed.

  “What about rune magic?” I asked. “Can you summon enough gold to cover the fur?”

  Wergild cannot be cheated, Hearth signed. Gold must be earned or won by some great effort.

  “That’ll take years!”

  “Perhaps not,” Inge murmured, as if talking to the blue rug. “There is a way.”

  Hearth turned to her. How?

  Inge clasped her hands in agitation. I wasn’t sure if she was aware that she was making the sign for marriage. “I—I don’t mean to speak out of turn. But there is the Careful One.”

  Hearth threw his hands up in the universal gesture for Are you kidding me? He signed: Careful One is a legend.

  “No,” Inge said. “I know where he is.”

  Hearth stared at her in dismay. Even if. No. Too dangerous. Everyone who tries to rob him ends up dead.

  “Not everyone,” Inge said. “It would be dangerous, but you could do it, Hearth. I know you could.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “Who’s the Careful One? What are you talking about?”

  “There—there is a dwarf,” Inge said. “The only dwarf in Alfheim except for…” She nodded toward our petrified friend. “The Careful One has a hoard of gold large enough to cover this rug. I could tell you how to find him—if you don’t mind a fairly high chance that you’ll die.”

  Hearthstone? More Like Hearthrob. Am I Right?

  YOU SHOULDN’T make a comment about imminent death and then say “Good night! We’ll talk about it tomorrow!”

  But Inge insisted we shouldn’t go after the dwarf until the morning. She pointed out that we needed rest. She brought us extra clothes, food and drink, and a couple of pillows. Then she scurried off, maybe to clean up spills or dust artifact niches or pay Mr. Alderman five gold for the privilege of being his servant.

  Hearth didn’t want to talk about the killer dwarf Careful One or his gold. He didn’t want to be consoled about his dead mother or his living father. After a quick gloomy meal, he signed, Need sleep, and promptly collapsed on his mattress.

  Just out of spite, I decided to sleep on the rug. Sure, it was creepy, but how often do you get to recline on one hundred percent genuine Pees-in-the-Well fur?

  Hearthstone had told me that the sun never set in Alfheim. It just sort of dipped to the horizon and came back up again, like in summer in the arctic. I’d wondered if I’d have trouble sleeping when there was no night. But I needn’t have worried—here in Hearthstone’s windowless room, one flick of the light switch left me in total darkness.

  I’d had a long day, what with fighting democratic zombies and then getting dropped out of an airplane into the wealthy suburbs of Elitist-heim. The evil creature’s fur was surprisingly warm and comfortable. Before I knew it, I had drifted off into not-so-peaceful slumber.

  Seriously, I don’t know if there’s a Norse god of dreams, but if there is, I’m going to find his house and hack apart his Sleep Number mattress with a battle-ax.

  I got treated to a flurry of disturbing image
s, none of which made much sense. I saw my Uncle Randolph’s ship listing in the storm, heard his daughters screaming from inside the wheelhouse. Sam and Amir—who had no business being there—clung to opposite sides of the deck, trying to reach each other’s hands until a wave crashed over them and swept them out to sea.

  The dream shifted. I saw Alex Fierro in her suite in Valhalla, throwing ceramic pots across the atrium. Loki stood in her bedroom, casually adjusting his paisley bow tie in the mirror as pots passed through him and smashed against the wall.

  “It’s such a simple request, Alex,” he said. “The alternative will be unpleasant. Do you think because you’re dead you have nothing left to lose? You are very wrong.”

  “Get out!” Alex screamed.

  Loki turned, but he was no longer a he. The god had changed into a young woman with long red hair and dazzling eyes, an emerald green evening gown accentuating her figure. “Temper, temper, love,” she purred. “Remember where you come from.”

  The words reverberated, shaking the scene apart.

  I found myself in a cavern of bubbling sulfuric pools and thick stalagmites. The god Loki, wearing only a loincloth, lay lashed to three rock columns—his arms spread wide, his legs bound together, his ankles and wrists tied with glistening dark cords of calcified guts. Coiled around a stalactite above his head was a massive green serpent, jaws open, fangs dripping venom into the god’s eyes. But instead of screaming, Loki was laughing as his face burned. “Soon enough, Magnus!” he called. “Don’t forget your wedding invitation!”

  A different scene: a mountainside in Jotunheim in the middle of a blizzard. At the summit stood the god Thor, his red beard and shaggy hair flecked with ice, his eyes blazing. In his thick fur cloak, with his hide clothes dusted with snow, he looked like the Abominable Ginger Snowman. Coming up the slope to kill him were a thousand giants—an army of muscle-bound gargantuans in armor fashioned from slabs of stone, their spears the size of redwood trees.

  With his gauntlets, Thor raised his hammer—the mighty Mjolnir. Its head was a slab of iron shaped roughly like a flattened circus tent, blunt on both ends and pointed in the middle. Runic designs swirled across the metal. In the god’s double-fisted grip, Mjolnir’s handle looked so stubby it was almost comical, like he was a child raising a weapon much too heavy for him. The army of giants laughed and jeered.

  Then Thor brought down the hammer. At his feet, the side of the mountain exploded. Giants went flying in a million-ton maelstrom of rock and snow, lightning crackling through their ranks, hungry tendrils of energy burning them to ashes.

  The chaos subsided. Thor glowered down at the thousand dead enemies now littering the slopes. Then he looked directly at me.

  “You think I can do that with a staff, Magnus Chase?” he bellowed. “HURRY UP WITH THAT HAMMER!”

  Then, being Thor, he lifted his right leg and farted a thunderclap.

  The next morning, Hearthstone shook me awake.

  I felt like I’d been bench-pressing Mjolnir all night, but I managed to stumble into the shower, then dress myself in elfish linen and denim. I had to roll up the sleeves and cuffs about sixteen times to make them fit.

  I wasn’t sure about leaving Blitzen behind, but Hearthstone decided that our friend would be safer here than where we were going. We set him on the mattress and tucked him in. Then the two of us crept out of the house, thankfully without encountering Mr. Alderman.

  Inge had agreed to meet us at the back edge of the estate. We found her waiting where the well-kept lawn met a gnarled line of trees and undergrowth. The sun was on the rise again, turning the sky blood orange. Even with my sunglasses on, my eyeballs were screaming in pain. Stupid beautiful sunrise in stupid Elf World.

  “I don’t have long,” Inge fretted. “I bought a ten-minute break from the master.”

  That made me angry all over again. I wanted to ask how much it would cost to buy ten minutes of stomping Mr. Alderman with cleats, but I figured I shouldn’t waste Inge’s valuable time.

  She pointed to the woods. “Andvari’s lair is in the river. Follow the current downstream to the waterfall. He dwells in the pool at its base.”

  “Andvari?” I asked.

  She nodded uneasily. “That is his name—the Careful One, in the old language.”

  “And this dwarf lives underwater?”

  “In the shape of a fish,” said Inge.

  “Oh. Naturally.”

  Hearthstone signed to Inge: How do you know this?

  “I…well, Master Hearthstone, hulder still have some nature magic. We’re not supposed to use it, but—I sensed the dwarf the last time I was in the woods. Mr. Alderman only tolerates this patch of wilderness on his property because…you know, hulder need a forest nearby to survive. And he can always…hire more help in there.”

  She said hire. I heard catch.

  The ten-minute cleat-stomping session was sounding better and better.

  “So this dwarf…” I said, “what’s he doing in Alfheim? Doesn’t the sunlight turn him to stone?”

  Inge’s cow tail flicked. “According to the rumors I’ve heard, Andvari is over a thousand years old. He has powerful magic. The sunlight barely affects him. Also, he stays in the darkest depths of the pool. I—I suppose he thought Alfheim was a safe place to hide. His gold has been stolen before, by dwarves, humans, even gods. But who would look for a dwarf and his treasure here?”

  Thank you, Inge, Hearth signed.

  The hulder blushed. “Just be careful, Master Hearth. Andvari is tricky. His treasure is sure to be hidden and protected by all sorts of enchantments. I’m sorry I can only tell you where to find him, not how to defeat him.”

  Hearthstone gave Inge a hug. I was afraid the poor girl’s bonnet might pop off like a bottle cap.

  “I—please—good luck!” She dashed off.

  I turned to Hearthstone. “Has she been in love with you since you were kids?”

  Hearth pointed at me, then circled his finger at the side of his head. You’re crazy.

  “Whatever, man,” I said. “I’m just glad you didn’t kiss her. She would’ve passed out.”

  Hearthstone gave me an irritated grunt. Come on. Dwarf to rob.

  We Nuke All the Fish

  I HAD trekked through the wilderness of Jotunheim. I had lived on the streets of Boston. Somehow the swath of uncultivated land behind the Alderman Manor seemed even more dangerous.

  Glancing behind us, I could still see the house’s towers peeking above the woods. I could hear traffic from the road. The sun shone down as glaringly cheerful as usual. But under the gnarled trees, the gloom was tenacious. The roots and rocks seemed determined to trip me. In the upper branches, birds and squirrels gave me the stink eye. It was as if this little patch of nature were trying doubly hard to stay wild in order to avoid getting turned into a tea garden.

  If I even see you bringing a croquet set up in here, the trees seemed to say, I will make you eat the mallets.

  I appreciated the attitude, but it made our stroll a little nerve-racking.

  Hearthstone seemed to know where he was going. The thought of Andiron and him playing in these woods as boys gave me new respect for their courage. After picking our way through a few acres of thornbushes, we emerged in a small clearing with a cairn of stones in the center.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Hearthstone’s expression was tight and painful, as if he were still forging through the briar. He signed, The well.

  The melancholy of the place seeped into my pores. This was the spot where his brother had died. Mr. Alderman must have filled in the well—or maybe he had forced Hearthstone to do it after he’d finished skinning the evil creature. The act had probably earned Hearth a couple of gold coins.

  I circled my fist over my chest, the sign for I’m sorry.

  Hearth stared at me as if the sentiment did not compute. He knelt next to the cairn and picked up a small flat stone from the top. Engraved on it in dark red was a rune:

>   Othala. Inheritance. The same symbol Randolph’s little girl Emma had been clutching in my dream. Seeing it in real life, I felt seasick all over again. My face burned with the memory of Randolph’s scar.

  I recalled what Loki had said in the wight’s tomb: Blood is a powerful thing. I can always find you through him. For a second, I wondered if Loki had somehow put the rune here as a message for me, but Hearthstone didn’t seem surprised to find it.

  I knelt next to him and signed, Why is that here?

  Hearthstone pointed to himself. He set the stone carefully back on top of the pile.

  Means home, he signed. Or what is important.

  “Inheritance?”

  He considered for a moment, then nodded. I put it here when I left, years ago. This rune I will not use. It belongs with him.

  I stared at the pile of rocks. Were some of these the same ones that eight-year-old Hearthstone had been playing with when the monster attacked his brother? This place was more than a memorial for Andiron. Part of Hearthstone had died here, too.

  I was no magician, but it seemed wrong for a set of runestones to be missing one symbol. How could you master a language—especially the language of the universe—without all the letters?

  I wanted to encourage Hearth to take back the rune. Surely Andiron would want that. Hearth had a new family now. He was a great sorcerer. His cup of life had been refilled.

  But Hearthstone avoided my eyes. It’s easy not to heed someone when you’re deaf. You simply don’t look at them. He rose and walked on, gesturing for me to follow.

  A few minutes later, we found the river. It wasn’t impressive—just a swampy creek like the one that meandered through the Fenway greenbelt. Clouds of mosquitos hovered over marsh grass. The ground was like warm bread pudding. We followed the current downstream through thick patches of bramble and bog up to our knees. The thousand-year-old dwarf Andvari had picked a lovely place to retire.

  After last night’s dreams, my nerves were raw.

  I kept thinking about Loki bound in his cave. And his appearance in Alex Fierro’s suite: It’s such a simple request. If that had actually happened, what did Loki want?

  I remembered the assassin, the goat-killer who liked to possess flight instructors. He’d told me to bring Alex to Jotunheim: SHE IS NOW YOUR ONLY HOPE FOR SUCCESS. That did not bode well.

  Three days from now, the giant Thrym expected a wedding. He would want his bride, as well as a bride-price of the Skofnung Sword and Stone. In exchange, maybe, we would get back Thor’s hammer and prevent hordes of Jotunheim from invading Boston.

  I thought about the thousand giants I’d seen in my dream, marching into battle to challenge Thor. I wasn’t anxious to face such a force—not without a big hammer that could explode mountains and fry invading armies into sizzly bits.

  I guessed what Hearth and I were doing now made sense: trudging through Alfheim, trying to retrieve gold from some old dwarf so we could get the Skofnung Stone and heal Blitz. Still…I felt as if Loki was intentionally keeping us sidetracked, not giving us time to think. He was like a point guard waving his hands in our faces, distracting us from shooting for the net. There was more to this wedding deal than getting Thor’s hammer back. Loki had a plan within a plan. He’d recruited my Uncle Randolph for some reason. If only I could find a moment to gather my thoughts without being pulled from one life-threatening problem to another….

  Yeah, right. You have just described your entire life and afterlife, Magnus.

  I tried to tell myself everything would be fine. Unfortunately, my esophagus didn’t believe me. It kept yo-yoing up and down from my chest to my teeth.

  The first waterfall we found was a gentle trickle over a mossy ledge. Open meadows stretched out on either bank. The water wasn’t deep enough for a fish to