The Jekyll Legacy by Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Thirty-Two — Many Meetings

Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln,
did you enjoy the play?

 — Anonymous

 

With no time to lose, he yelled, “If he opens wide, pop a pill in!” hoping that this would be cryptic enough to confuse Sinmœra for a few seconds, yet clear enough for Rhea and Selene, who’d gone ahead with his more instantly lethal replacements for the ‘dandelion’ bombs in duffels slung over their shoulders. He only hoped that they’d been quick enough in getting to some sort of strategic place from which to throw them.

“Hey! Hel Hag!” he yelled again with a bravado he didn’t exactly feel. “The game’s up! Come out with your hands in the air, and drop your weapon!”

Sinmœra laughed cruelly, holding the Heart of Virtue casually in the tongs, careless of the flames licking up from it as she held it up before her like a talisman. “You’re in my domain now, tiny man, and I make all the demands.”

Phil began to ready a spell as he approached the Giantess, but said, “Your days as a Queen are numbered on the fingers of one hand, foul enchantress. I, Emperor Philip of Myriad, do name you outlaw, and banish you forever to the outer wastes!”

“Fool! Arrogant Fool!” she cried. “You see before you the Bane of All Things Living! The Heart of Darkness! Death! The Destroyer of Worlds! You have no power here!” She held up the Heart and began to chant, and Phil could feel the fell grip of its perverted mockery of life-in-death take hold of him, even as he took hold of it and her with a spell of power. He continued advancing, until he was close enough almost to touch her. He was smiling. “Now, Death, thou shalt die,” he said simply, as he opened an instantaneous centaurean one-way portal beneath their feet and instantly lunged out, reaching to make physical contact with the Heart itself, wrested it from the witch’s tongs and bent it to his will, touching it to her flesh, then felt himself falling, saw the witch — taken completely unawares — falling, the Heart falling with them, bound together tightly with ensorcelled ties more strict than death, and he fell into the very heart of light with a shout of pure joy… before he died suffused, torn asunder, scattered into atoms, then ionized, by the bright thermonuclear glory of victory.”

From their positions above Phil’s confrontation with the witch, Rhea and Selene saw Jörmungandr rear and open its gaping maw, preparing to strike at Phil so, as he’d presciently advised, threw three weapons each — Phil’s new bombs — neatly into the serpent’s mouth, where they went off and silently decapitated the worm, sending the atoms of its head and brains into the Sun to flash instantaneously into plasma just as they saw Sinmœra, the firey Heart she held, her entire forge, and Phil himself fall through a handcrafted version of the same effect to the same fate — a swiftly-fading amber glow upon the icy rock and the hollow echo of Phil’s last shout the only remnants of his passing, and they both screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

Numbly, they picked through the rubble left behind, searching for some clue, but there was none, other than Phil’s discarded duffle. The witch Sinmœra, late Queen of Hel, was dead, ding dong, but so was Phil, and it seemed so pointless. He’d obviously had something in mind when he’d told them so cryptically to kill the serpent, but exactly what — or even roughly what — was a mystery. They’d seen the Heart vanish, of course, but why had he invested his own life in taking out Sinmœra?

“Crap!” Rhea cursed, kicking at a rock on the icy ground, then looking around for something, anything more satisfying to kick or break, but there was nothing but an enormous river of dead snake extending back up the valley, and there seemed no point in doing anything with it. It was cold enough that this part of it seemed likely to rest unputrefied forever, a frozen carcass for some future palaeontologist to discover and wonder about.

Selene said nothing.

The three centaurs had gathered together, huddled close for warmth and comfort in the bitter cold, and likewise more accustomed, perhaps, to sudden death in wild places, because one called out from where they stood, tails toward the wind, “Rhea, Selene? We’re terribly sorry about Phil, but we’ve got to head back. We’ll be on very short rations before we reach the edge of Niflheimr as it is, and we still don’t know if either of you can make Phil’s bridge operate to take us back to Svartálfheimr.”

Selene answered, “Of course, dear friends. I was just trying to imagine what he saw in those last moments that convinced him that whatever it was that Sinmœra was planning to do with the Heart of Darkness was so terrible that he had to stop her, at any cost.”

“Well,” Rhea said, “other than working her way toward destroying all the worlds and every living thing, what could be worse?”

“I don’t know, Honey. I don’t know. I wish I did. It must have been something sudden, because I can’t imagine him not saying something to us, otherwise.”

“No, I suppose not,” she said listlessly. “Nothing matters anymore.”

“Don’t ever say that, Rhea!” she said fiercely. “We have to work toward completing whatever’s left of Phil’s life work! If nothing else, we have to do that for him. Remember what he said? ‘It’s not incumbent on us to finish the work, but neither are we at liberty to desist from it.’ We have a duty to perform, and I intend to do my part in it, the first being to see to it that our friends the centaurs are able to safely rejoin their herd. Whatever it was that he was up to in his last moments, making sure that we were safe, — that all his friends and dependents were safe — that all the worlds were safe — was part of it, I know.”

The journey south was a grim trek through an empty landscape, since the hulking Hrímthurs they’d seen from time to time on the road north had inexplicably vanished, perhaps dealing with the sudden and drastic alteration Phil had made in their social pecking order. The one Frost Giant they stumbled across — evidently a sentinel stationed near the border of Niflheimer to keep out the riffraff — was dispatched almost offhand, as soon as he’d made an obviously hostile movement toward them, and without the usual banter and cheerful sangfroid they normally displayed in combat.

There was a pervasive air of melancholy that surrounded the entire party, but especially Selene and Rhea, who still expected Phil to appear at any moment, as if he’d simply wandered off to look at a particularly interesting rock formation, and might be just around the next corner.

Of course, he wasn’t, and never would be again.

Even their abrupt and brief encounter with the hostile Hrímthur had failed to cheer them, and the two women approached the edge of Niflheimer with an air of distracted ennui. The centaurs, perhaps wisely — or perhaps more in kindness — held themselves slightly apart, trudging along behind them, allowing them the privacy of their thoughts.

There it was, the precipice, and the same bright clouds below. “Well, here we are,” said Selene.

“Do you have any idea how that bridge thingie works?” asked Rhea.

“Not a clue,” was the reply, and she dug through Philip’s duffel, looking for it. When she found it, she held it up between them, as if their shared ignorance might penetrate its secrets. “I wasn’t paying much attention, actually, but I had the impression that he held it like a fishing rod and sort of ‘flicked’ it toward where he wanted to go.”

They both studied it carefully. It was long and thin, almost like a wand, and made of metal with joints so cleverly fitted that they seemed almost like engraved lines upon a solid rod. “Which end is the handle?” Rhea asked.

Selene shook her head. “Again, I haven’t a clue. I was never all that much interested in machinery. Phil always took care of stuff like that.”

Rhea nodded, glumly. “Me too,” she said. She reached out, as if to touch it, then changed her mind.

Selene was holding it rather gingerly, as if it might explode into its expanded form with a touch. Then, for lack of something better to do, she stared off into the distance, where she could see the island world of Svartálfheimr, where the majority of their expedition were camped on the opposite ‘shore,’ as it were. “I wish we’d thought to have Akcuanrut along as… never mind.” She’d almost said ‘backup,’ and then silently cursed herslf for thinking it.

“I know what you mean,” Rhea said, and burst into tears, which of course opened the floodgates of grief for both of them, and they wept, then sobbed, then clutched at each other for comfort as they both collapsed into helpless suffering and heartbreak, winding up on their knees, each held upright only by the strength of the other.

Then flying Eir Menglöð and Sleipnir came rushing through the air, Sleipnir rearing to a stop as he himself touched down, and Eir herself vaulted from her mount’s back and caught them both up in her strong arms, saying, “Hush, my lambs, my darling girls. He’s only dead. He died a hero!” and tried to kiss away their tears.

“How can you say that?!” they wailed. “You loved him too!”

She smiled, then laughed. “And who am I but The Chooser of the Slain? What happens to heroes in this world?”

“But he’s not in this world!” they both screamed at her. “The bloody idiot jumped into the damned Sun!”

“Well,” she said, “I have to confess that this does present a problem, since I rarely have to fetch my people from across dimensions and the vastnesses of space, but all things are possible with the help of a pure heart and good intentions, which you’ll have to admit, I have in full measure.” She looked up and said, “In fact, here I come.”

Then flying another pair of Eir and Sleipnir avatars came rushing through the air, pulling up only as the other version of Eir vaulted from her other mount’s back and said, “Dear hearts! Don’t worry! I’m looking for his soul, even as we speak. That Sun of yours is a terribly confusing sort of place, with all sorts of violence going on, all at once, like a giant Mælström of elemental fire.”

“He’s still alive!?” they both cried out, hardly daring to hope.

“Well… no… not exactly,” she admitted. “He’s dead, of course, but his spirit is made of stronger stuff, especially since my uncle Freyr elevated him to the status of a Ljósálfr, a necessary prerequisite for taking on the rôle of King of Álfheimr and of the Ljósálfar, so it’s really just a matter of time.”

“How much time?” Rhea asked sceptically.

“It’s difficult to say,” she said, “since I’ve never actually encountered a similar situation, I’ve spent several years in exploring your Sun already, but have every confidence of eventual success.”

“Do you know how big the Sun is?” Rhea asked, conversationally, which wasn’t a good sign.

“Well, no, other than that it’s very large.”

“It’s an almost perfect sphere, roughly eight hundred and sixty-five thousand miles in diameter, or approximately three hundred and forty billion cubic miles. Assuming the the Sun was frozen solid, and that it takes you one second to search every cubic mile thoroughly, it would only take eleven thousand years or so to be sure of finding him, but in the meantime solar magnetic storms and convection cells are churning it around at a fantastic rate, with bits and pieces being flung off into interstellar space at random intervals, so I think you might be more certain of success in a billion years or so, but who’s counting?” Rhea smiled, but not at all nicely.

“That big?” Eir asked, stunned.

“That big,” Selene assured her.

“Oh,” Eir said. “Well, it may take a bit more time, then.” With that, both pairs of Eirs and Sleipnirs left, flying off in two different directions.

Selene and Rhea watched them as they grew smaller, then vanished. Rhea said, “Dang! We should have asked her how to work the bridge.”

Selene turned to her and said, “Yeah, we should have done.”

At dusk, they got out two of Phil’s light balls and turned them on to cast a brilliant light across the gap between the edge of the cliff and the distant island in the clouds that was Svartálfheimr, hoping that someone in the camp would see them and figure out how to send someone across, since no amount of banging and flinging of the so-called ‘bridge’ had any effect at all. “You’d think Phil would have shown us how this stupid thing worked!” Selene said, not irritated, exactly.

“Yeah,” Rhea said. “He probably wasn’t figuring on not being around….” Then she shut up and they sat in silence for a good long time, long enough for the pair of lights to flicker into a dim glow, then cast no light at all.

After some time, Rhea got up and got two more light balls from Phil’s duffle, then turned them on and placed them on the edge of the precipice, surrounding them with bits of rock and icy snow to make sure they could be easily seen and not drift off if the wind picked up. “I wish we had more stuff for the girls to eat,” she said. “I’m not particularly hungry, but they must be famished.”

Selene nodded her agreement, but had nothing much to add, so they sat in silence, waiting.

Eventually, Rhea started singing in a clear soft voice, almost like a lullaby. It was the romanza from the second act of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore — a classic soprano solo — though her expression of it was slightly darkened by emotion. The pitch, even a cappella, was perfect, the phrasing spot on. She had a gift that way.

“Una furtiva lagrima
negli occhi suoi spuntò:
Quelle festose giovani
invidiar sembrò.
Che più cercando io vo?
Che più cercando io vo?

“M’ama! Sì, m’ama, lo vedo. Lo vedo.

“Un solo istante i palpiti
del suo bel cor sentir!
I miei sospir, confondere
per poco a’ suoi sospir!

“I palpiti, i palpiti sentir,
confondere i miei coi suoi sospir…

“Cielo! Si può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.

“Ah, cielo! Si può! Si, può morir!
Di più non chiedo, non chiedo.
Si può morir! Si può morir d’amor.”

“Very nice,” Selene said, after a suitable hush. “I don’t speak Italian, though.”

“It’s a song about tragedy, and how one might die of love for all the wrong reasons, even stupid reasons.”

“Yeah,” she said, and sighed. “Would you mind singing it again?”

 

 

It was getting close to dawn, Selene decided. The sky overhead was definitely getting lighter, although it was also heavily overcast, so they couldn’t see any stars, so it was difficult to judge exactly how far along it was toward sunrise. Looking off toward Svartálfheimr, she thought that she could see a little more detail on the gloomy edge of the cliff that was closest, although the odd luminescence of the cloud layer beneath them made it hard to judge that too. As night-lights went, the glowing clouds that concealed the branches and trunk of Yggdrasil were peculiarly ineffective.

She was wondering why, exactly, this was so when she thought she saw a motion of some sort, against the dull haze of the clouds that seemed almost clamped down upon what she could see of the distant horizon, which was little enough. She nudged Rhea, who was huddled close beside her, for both warmth and comfort. “Rhea! Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” she said grumpily. “What’s up, buttercup?”

Selene smiled, thinking of sleepovers in their childhood, and answered accordingly, “What’s the word, hummingbird?”

“No fair!” she said. “I asked you first.”

“I think I see Sleipnir and Eir heading toward us.”

“Does she have Phil with her?” Rhea, as always, came straight to the point.

She looked carefully, wishing that it were lighter. “I don’t think so.” Although she was still far off, the distant figure astride the flying horse seemed slim, and Phil’s bulk would surely have been visible, even riding behind her.

“Then I’m not interested,” she said, and snuggled closer.

“Rhea, sweetie, be nice. I’m quite sure that she wants to find him just as much as we do, but we know that it’s going to take a while. Besides,” she added, “we need to ask her to ferry Akcuanrut over so he can figure out how Phil’s little bridge works.”

Rhea was staring off toward the approaching rider. “I don’t think we’ll need to ask. Through some miracle of prescience, Eir seems to be toting King Alvís along with her.”

Sure enough, they could see the dwarven King hanging onto Eir with his eyes screwed tight shut as Sleipnir lightly touched down and Eir picked him up from behind her with a lithe twist and set him down upon the ground as carefully as she might an infant, all without dismounting. It was an astonishing display of strength and flexibility. “Here we go,” she said. “Safe back on the solid ground!”

“And about time, too!” he said, glaring at the icy rocks and frozen snow around him as if they’d personally insulted him and he was spoiling for a fight. “I don’t hold with gallivanting around in the sky, let me tell you, begging your pardon, of course, Ma’am.” Then he looked at her ingratiatingly and asked, “I’m not dead, am I?”

“No, you’re not,” Eir Menglöð said to him, dismounting without any noticeable effort, “but I thought your unique talents might be useful here, since one of your cunning devices is inadvertently thwarting the efforts of my sister wives to return to your homeland with their friends.”

The little King looked around the barren ground and said, suspiciously, “Where’s my good friend Phil?”

Eir blushed and said, “I seem to have temporarily mislaid him. Please rest assured that I’m sparing no efforts to find him, but he was involved with an altercation with Hel, Sinmœra, to be more precise, so his current manifestation was destroyed and of course returned to the Sun, his natural form, but in another plane of existence.”

“Another plane of existence? He’d said that he wasn’t from our Nine Worlds, but I’d thought that it might simply be a touch of the divine madness. You know how they get, the Gods, I mean.” Then he thought better of what he’d just spoken and added, “Meaning no disrespect, of course, Ma’am.”

She laughed and said, “None taken, dear Alvís. You’re getting taller by the minute, you know.”

“Taller? Why in all the worlds would I want to be taller?” he said indignantly. “I’d be forever hitting my head on low doorways…. Why, I’d have to rebuild my whole feasting hall!”

“That would be a problem,” she said sympathetically.

“Well, never mind,” he said brusquely. “Let’s have a look at my device.”

Selene handed it over, since she had it handy. “Here it is,” she said.

He looked at it carefully, then — strangely — took her hand and studied it, then said, “I see what the problem is. Do you see these areas on the shaft?” He carefully pointed them out, three ovals in a very slight curve around the shaft of the device, another slightly offset counterclockwise below, and a larger oval above them all, offset clockwise almost entirely to the opposite side. “They make a sort of spiral. They’re meant to fit Phil’s thumb and four fingers quite precisely — a sort of personal ‘key,’ — but if you know the trick of it, you can simply contort your hand slightly to fit the ‘fingerprints,’ you might say, instead of falling naturally, the way one would, of course.” He handed it back to Selene and said, “Here, try it one finger at a time, but not all at once, or the bridge will expand, which is not a terribly good idea without a clear destination in mind.”

She picked it up with some trepidation, since she wasn’t all that fond of magical devices, other than Phil’s little hand grenades, of course, and the light globes. “Okay,” she said, and very carefully tried out the indicated positions one finger at a time, the others held stiffly away from the shaft of the device to avoid mistakes. It felt awkward, even strained, since Phil’s hands were so much larger than hers, but she thought that she could manage it. She looked down at the dwarf and said, “I think I’ve got it. Keep the destination in mind, place my fingers on the right spots, and it pops out like a self-unfolding umbrella.”

“Umbrellr?” he asked.

“It’s a sort of rain shield that you hold over your head in rainstorms to keep from getting wet, although people also use them to shade themselves from the sun in hot climates. The word actually means ‘little shade,’ so that was probably its primary purpose at one time, but these days we tend to call an umbrella that’s designed primarily to furnish shade a ‘parasol,’ and reserve the name….” She noticed that his eyes were glazing over and said, “Never mind. I’m sure that you’d come up with something far more clever if you ever felt the need.”

At that, he brightened up. “Undoubtedly!” he enthused. “We Dvergar make the best of everything! And I, of course, craft the very best of the best!”

“They are, King Alvís. That’s for sure. Would you like to ride back with us on your darling little bridge, or would you like to go back with Eir Menglöð, the way you arrived?” Selene had a notion that he’d prefer to keep his feet on the ground, or something like it, but thought she’d ask.

He shuddered. “If I never fly through the air again, it will be much too soon! I’ve got a bone to pick with Phil, though, when and if he returns. He’d told me that he had a plan to use my dwarves and me in the battle with Surtr and his Fire Jötunns.”

Rhea grimaced and said, “That was our fault, actually. By the time we reached Múspellsheimr, the battle was already underway, and Phil wasn’t quite ready, so retired from the field to prepare a weapon to use against the Giants. In the meantime, Selene and I, with the able assistance of Eir Menglöð, managed to cripple Surtr, and when he showed up at Bilröst, his own army killed him and simply went home. The official Ragnarök was over just like that, and even Phil was a little put out when he came back with his weapon and there was no war going on that he could use it in.”

“What does this ‘weapon’ actually do?” he asked.

“It opens up a gateway between this world and our Sun,” she said.

King Alvís nodded in instant comprehension. “So Phil was caught up in the backlash of his own weapon? I’d warned him about magical devices, even in Svartálfheimr. The curses associated with magic are much worse in Niflheimr, and more difficult to handle.”

“It wasn’t a curse, though,” Rhea protested. “Something happened — or Phil saw something happening — that he must have felt that he had to prevent at any cost. He sacrificed himself to pull Sinmœra and the Heart of Virtue bodily into the gateway that led into the heart of the Sun, before she could do whatever it was that she was planning.”

His brows furrowed and he said, “Could you show me this place?”

Rhea and Selene looked at each other, then said, “Well, ordinarily, yes, but we’re all very tired, and we haven’t actually had anything to eat since yesterday. I’m afraid some of us might not survive the journey.”

He grimaced, then turned to Eir and asked, “Could you fly us there?” Then he clamped his jaw shut in grim determination, as if preparing himself to cut off his own arm.

She smiled. “Taller every day,” she said.

King Alvís merely scowled.

At the gates of Hel, nothing had changed that they could see, except that the body of the serpent, Jörmungandr, was frozen solid, and the steel gate in the rock cliff was beginning to rust. “Describe what happened, if you would. There’s not much left behind to see.”

Selene told the story, from Phil’s sighting of the door, to their separation, Phil’s cryptic order to kill Jörmungandr, and the final scene at the forge, although she couldn’t remember exactly what had been said as Phil was closing the distance between them. When she got to the very last moments, when she was trying to describe the look of triumph on Phil’s face as he’d shouted joyfully, even as he fell through the portal, she broke down, and Rhea with her. At last, she managed to control her emotions enough to speak, and she began to speak….

…only to be cut off. “I’ve heard enough to make an educated guess, based on Phil’s previous description of the Heart. As I understand it, this weapon is somehow able to corrupt and reform bodies, bending them to its will?”

“Yes!” Selene and Rhea said in chorus. “We’ve actually seen this happen, when the Emperor’s Champion, D’lon-ra, was taken and absorbed by the Heart, corrupting not only his body, but his mind and soul.”

“Then it’s clear that the witch Sinmœra planned to use the Heart to do the same to Jörmungandr, and I think it must have been equally clear to Phil. With a serpent big enough to wrap itself around all the worlds corrupted and totally subsumed into its own evil nature, it would be a simple matter to destroy all our worlds through mere strength, much less the power to eat the world itself into the bargain. He obviously asked you to destroy it so that the snake itself couldn’t be influenced by the Heart to reach out to take the foul thing into its own mouth and so coöperate in its own destruction. Then he took the burning Heart into his own hand to prevent the witch from gaining control of it — possibly to distract it as well, a dual purpose very useful in a contest of wills — and then he used the Heart to destroy the witch herself, and then plunged himself into cleansing fire, destroying both the Heart and the witch Sinmœra with utter finality.” He shook his head in awe. “What a Warrior stood there! Steadfast and bold in the face of Death! What strategic insight, steely courage, and grim resolve! I only wish that I’d been there to die in his company. The poets will be singing of this victory for a thousand years or more!”

Rhea rolled her eyes and glanced toward Selene, who seemed to have the same opinion. Whatever else King Alvís was, he was still a man.

On the edge of the cliff, Selene stood concentrating on the distant outline of their landing place, where all the rest of their party — all but one — were gathered. She’d studied the bridge mechanism until she thought that she could grasp all five points of it without looking. ‘If not now, when?’ she thought, and said, “Ready?”

At their nod, she looked long and hard at the edge of Svartálfheimr, then pressed the oval triggers and cast out the tip of the gadget like a badminton racquet. Like magic, the bridge began to unfold, just as it had for Phil, and she felt a frisson of excitement. “Alright, people, let’s go!” she cried, and stepped onto the surface of the bridge, feeling the familiar ‘escalator’ feeling as she arched up into the sky, followed closely by King Alvís — rather too closely, she thought, since he seemed to be staring directly at her butt — and then the rest of their party, save only Eir, who had her own transport ready.

When the last of them had stepped onto the bridge, she mounted Sleipnir and galloped up until she rode easily beside them, loping along in casual camaraderie as she kept them company on the journey south. “Your description of Phil’s last assault upon the Heart of Virtue and Sinmœra was very moving,” she said. “I haven’t gone out of my way to see the actual moment, because I thought that it might be too much to bear, but your account of it made me very proud.”

“I don’t know about you, Eir, but I’d just as soon not remember it. This whole thing has been very painful, despite your reassurances that all will be well in the end.” She blinked back tears again, even though she could blame them on the wind of their rapid passage toward Svartálfheimr.

Eir kept silent through the rest of their flight.

Selene couldn’t remember the ground rushing up at her so quickly as it seemed to now, but it was a relief, to be back in camp, surrounded by everyone she knew, Gefjon, Larona, her oldest friend, Rhea, and Eir, and all the women they’d saved from death and pain, all those faces, so familiar, like looking in a mirror, except the thoughts behind those familiar faces weren’t hers, or not exactly. She smiled. ‘Let’s see the Dionne Quintuplets match this!’ she thought. They were more than merely ‘twins,’ the same person, in some sort of weird ontological sense, identical down to the cellular level, each gene sequence precisely mirrored, their fingerprints, even the flecks in their corneas identical, beyond the ability of anyone on Earth to tell them apart. ‘Take that, CSI!’

Gefjon came up to her first, and she was grateful, although it was difficult to understand exactly why she felt so close to her. Perhaps it was that her relationship with Phil was almost as complex as her own, overlaid with alternate histories, misunderstandings, and confusion, but they were truly sisters, sharing the same grief, the same loss, the selfsame hole in their hearts where Phil used to be.

“Selene,” she said quietly, leaning in to enfold her in her arms and then kiss her. “I was so terribly grieved to hear about Phil’s death.”

“Gefjon,” she replied. “Eir claims that she’ll find him, eventually, but it’s difficult to ignore the reality of our final sight of him falling into the unimaginable fury of the Solar photosphere, and equally hard to comprehend the odds against finding him, lost as he is in an enormous churning chaos of nuclear fusion moderated only by the opposing pressures of light and gravity.”

Gefjon stroked her hair and murmured in her ear in a voice as soft as summer moonlight, “I know, honey, but I trust my daughter. If she says she’ll find him, she will.”

“But it’s taking so long!” she wailed, and fell to crying again, but it was better with Gefjon’s strong arms around her.

“Hush, my lamb, my darling girl,” she whispered. “He’ll be back, and soon, I feel it.”

Life went on — with or without Phil — and although the immediate danger was gone, with not a hint of trouble anywhere within the Nine Worlds, Larona’s scrying revealed that the rogue Dvergar were wreaking havoc in Myriad upon the people of the Empire, using Dwarvish devisings crafted by either Dáinn, or Náinn, or both together, with what remained of their people, still outlaws who defied the authority of King Alvís.

The Empress D’Larona-Cohn called a war council, including Akcuanrut, the leaders of her men-at-arms, Selene and Rhea, and King Alvís, as the ultimately responsible authority. “King Alvís, I’d like you to go with us to help bring your people back from my world, for you to punish as you see fit, but I do want to try to avoid killing them in wholesale lots, as we did before, because I suspect that they were lured by promises of an escape from your people’s former poverty, and didn’t realize the full consequences of their actions, since no one but a fool would take a bribe to help destroy the world he lived in, however greedy.”

Alvís answered fairly, “Empress Larona, your generosity and kindness does you credit. I accept full responsibility for the actions of Dáinn, Náinn, and their people, and will do my best to set it right. Emperor Philip’s generous gifts to me have left me in a much better position than I was before, since I now have the wherewithal to reward loyalty as it properly merits, and to punish traitors as they deserve. My Dvergar are at your service to help roust the traitors out from whatever secret places in which they choose to hide.”

“I could ask no more, King Alvís, and to show my gratitude guarantee the construction of a portal between our worlds which you and your subjects can make use of to supply and purchase trade goods at whatever price you choose and the marketplace allows. I further grant your people free access to the extensive caverns beneath the mountain ranges near our capital, to establish homes, roadhouses to accommodate travellers, shops and warehouses, or for whatever purpose you choose, with the guarantee of peaceful occupation under the laws and authority of our Empire. Never again will your people be entirely at the mercy of thieves and liars, and I believe that you would all be a very valuable addition to our body politic.”

King Alvís promptly knelt before her in feudal homage. “Your Imperial Highness, I’m overwhelmed. On behalf of myself and my people, I accept your protection and offer fealty and service in return, as is customary.”

“Rise, King Alvís. You’ll have a place on the Imperial Council, of course, and the customary titles and privileges within the Empire. Please feel free to contact the Imperial Herald with the arms and bearings of any of your nobility who choose to immigrate to our world.”

Selene was astonished by how quickly things were progressing. Larona, it seems, wasn’t at all inclined to ‘dick around’ with empty posturing and/or ‘negotiations’ meant to maintain either the status quo or to ensure advantage for one side over another. In one shrewd move she’d guarded her northern border with a staunch ally well-suited to mountain life, and those uninhabited mountains were a paradise in comparison to Svartálfheimr, with ample sun, rivers teaming with fish, forests for lumber and fuel, and potential mines for raw materials currently unused. Both she and Alvís were very likely to vastly increase their wealth with essentially no particular effort on the part of either.

With a population of ‘legitimate’ Dvergar in place, crowding out the rogues would happen almost automatically, since the new immigrants would be fighting for their future homes, whilst the interlopers would be trying to hang on to a temporary refuge and ‘hideout’ with their only lasting hope being surrender and reconciliation.

‘Checkmate,’ she thought.

Once the overall scope of the effort was decided upon, the preparations took surprisingly little time. Alvís sent out word to his people and had an army of a thousand Dwarves ready within three hours, after it was explained to them that they would all be supplied with food and other necessaries immediately upon their arrival in Myriad.

When the army of dwarves actually arrived, their appearance only reïnforced her guess that this episode marked the beginning of the endgame, since they arrived with wives and children, and many of the wives were armed. So terrible they seemed, their eyes filled with fierce sudden hope and grim determination, their clothes so threadbare and torn that patches of white skin showed through, that she thought the rogues might simply throw down their arms in terror as soon as they got a good look at them. It’s not for nothing that the Greek Furies were women, for women — once roused to anger — give no quarter, and will tear an armed man into pieces with their bare hands and teeth if their children are involved in the quarrel, and they were involved in this one, because the great mass of the Dvergar were obviously in desperate straits.

Their tentative plan was to set out from the Capital to the mountains — where the rogue Dwarves had carved out a stronghold well away from the river, having learned their lesson after the first abortive attempt to take out Rhea and Selene  — and there lay siege to the enemy with an army as readily-adapted to fighting in the dark and in close quarters as they were themselves.

Akcuanrut had set a batch of apprentices to churning out Phil’s light balls by the hundreds and the Dvergar were sharpening knives and preparing cunning devices of all shapes and sizes, evidently quite secret — even from new allies — since most of the dwarves hastily concealed what they were doing whenever anyone came close enough to spy out whatever it was that they were doing.

There was one new thing which wasn’t secret, and it was Selene’s doing, or so King Alvís said. He’d made what looked like a beekeeper’s suit, complete with broad-brimmed hat and closely-woven net, and had supplied a troop of assault troops with this as their uniform. “I call it my umbrella-suit,” he said with glee. “I know what those light balls of Phil’s can do, but this blocks out their light automatically, but still allows the wearer to see perfectly, even when the lights explode suddenly and then disappear. It all has to do with tiny shutters woven into the fabric of the head-net, which open and close in a fraction of a second at any preset level of brilliance. It’s all to do with certain chemical salts, you see, which undergo an almost instantaneous change of state when exposed to light, exerting torsion on the fibers of the cloth when stimulated, then relaxing when the light goes out.” He looked quite pleased with himself. “Even when the shutters are completely closed, I designed in enough small openings that one can easily see through the glare and attack one’s enemies with little fear of reprisal.” He turned to Selene and asked, “What do you think, Selene?”

She paused before speaking, since she didn’t want to rain on his parade, but it all struck her as being terribly bloodthirsty. “It seems awfully clever, King Alvís, and would certainly give you an advantage in fighting underground if Phil’s light balls are used, but I’m really hoping that the rebels surrender when they see how much power is arrayed against them. After seeing how desperately poor so many of your people are, I can easily see how they might have been coerced into coöperation by the true villains in these actions — surely Sinmœra, the Fire Jötunns, and their confederates — through hunger and a grinding poverty that left only despair and hopelessness in its wake. I suspect that at least some of them might have volunteered to be hung, if only they’d been guaranteed a nice last meal, and especially if they’d been allowed to give that last meal to their wives and children.”

The King frowned slightly, then said, “We do plan to offer them the opportunity to surrender, Selene. The Empress has very kindly volunteered the use of the many Scryers within the Imperial College of Wizards to ascertain individual guilt or innocence before any adverse decisions are made, and I’m here both to order their surrender as their legitimate Sovereign, and to guarantee their safety if they are innocent of any crime.” He paused and then added, “You must realize, though, that the savagery demonstrated in some of the attacks on the largely defenceless Wizards who’d been guarding the Heart of Virtue demonstrates that at least some of these ‘rebels’ were not innocent bystanders. We can’t be so tenderhearted that we allow very real villains to escape unscathed and make a mockery of our collective sense of justice.”

“No, I suppose you’re right,” she admitted. “On the other hand, when we fought the supposedly fierce Fire Jötunns who were destined to destroy the Nine Worlds and almost everyone in them, it amazed me how few of them really wanted to fight when it came right down to it. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, everybody simply packed up and went home. It was almost as if they were looking for an excuse to walk out that didn’t wind up with them looking like chumps.”

King Alvís thought about this for a while and then said, “There’s another way of looking at it, though. After all this build-up, after the Fire Jötunns had been fed a steady diet of ‘We are invincible!’ two young slips of girls, both visibly pregnant, whip the ass off the biggest and baddest Son of Múspell there ever was, in spite of the fact that he had a magic terror weapon that was supposed to make him invincible and neither one of the girls even break a nail. It may be that the Fire Jötunns thought that they looked like ‘chumps’ already, and were simply trying to avoid utter humiliation by blaming everything that happened on Surtr. He was the ‘chump,’ not they. By killing him, they were eliminating anyone who might contradict this happy theory, since — if he should chance to recover, and then prove to be as formidable as they’d thought he was — that would prove that all the Fire Jötunns were very likely ‘chumps’ as well, and just as inept as their former leader.” He waited while she thought about this for some moments, then added, “In fact, if I were inclined to wager, I’d bet that they were afraid of you two young girls, not to mention Eir Menglöð, and chose, like a beaten cur, to bite some weaker dog with an angry snarl before running off with their figurative tails between their legs.”

“Cognitive displacement!” she cried suddenly, then since he was obviously puzzled, added, “Just as you said, they redirected their fear and anger toward a ‘safe target,’ thereby neatly avoiding any further confrontation with the people they were afraid of.” She scowled, then said, “Dang! And here I’d thought to have discovered a hidden reservoir of common decency in the Fire Jötunns.”.

Alvís smiled indulgently and said, “Perhaps you have. Fear is often the precursor to wisdom. We should note, though, that they didn’t stop to apologize for all the mess they’d made, nor volunteer to help clean it up. I personally think that they’re as dangerous and cruel as they ever were, but simply ran up against foes they were afraid to face.”

She sighed. “That’s undoubtedly the prudent course. Okay, so we may not be met with flowers and sincere apologies when we finally confront the rebel Dvergar.”

He laughed. “On the other hand, we can count on fear, which may make them more ‘reasonable’ than they’d otherwise be inclined to do, and we have the Empress and her Sorceresses to help sort out the sheep from the goats.”

“So they’re not exactly going to be happy to see you, then?”

“No, they won’t be. While they might trust their underground burrows to protect them from our human friends, they’ll soon realize that they’ll be facing foes who already know whatever tricks they may think to have concealed. If I were them, I’d be hiding under the mattress in hopes that I’d simply be overlooked in the general rout.”

“Not you, I think, King Alvís the Bold. You stood alone before us, but still proud and defiant, when our powerful army abruptly invaded your domain, and we were not then terribly concerned for your safety, having recently been murderously attacked by those who looked very much like you.”

“Well,” he said, modestly enough, “one doesn’t become King of the Dvergar without a certain amount of nerve. We tend to be a fractious bunch, so it takes a fellow who doesn’t mind a little rough and tumble to keep the rabble in line. Don’t worry too much about the rebels; they’ll soon fall in line, as soon as they realize that I’ve found their little love nest in the clouds and am here to collect the back rents.”

She smiled and said, “You big softie! You’re worried about them aren’t you?”

He cleared his throat noisily and said, “Worried? Not me! It’s them that should be worried!”

She nodded sagely and said, “Absolutely! You’ll be very stern, I’m sure! They’ll be quaking in their boots!”

“Indeed!” he said grumpily. “They’d better act like they’re quaking, anyway!”

The expedition up into the mountains wasn’t nearly as involved or lengthy as it had been coming down. The Wizard had developed quite a bit of skill with portals in the interim, and simply opened one up to the meadow they’d camped in at the top of the pass, before descending to the valley. The location of the Dvergar hideout was only a few hours walk from there, just long enough to work the kinks out and become used to breathing at high altitude.

When they saw the location of the hideout, it was inconspicuous of course, but Akcuanrut said that they had an open portal, which was about as subtle as banging on a drum. He said so to the King. “I’m afraid, King Alvís, that your subjects aren’t very clever at keeping their location secret.”

“To be fair, Master Wizard, I’m quite sure that they know next to nothing about these portals of yours, and have been handed one as one might loan a man a plowhorse, so their ignorance of how to breed and train a horse, or a portal, can be forgiven.”

“True,” the wizard said. “I was being unkind.”

“No need to apologize,” King Alvís said, shaking his head. “They’re idiots. They can’t help themselves. I blame inbreeding; they’re from a rather remote village, and don’t get out much.”

“Well, we all have our burdens,” the wizard said. “Shall we give them an ultimatum, or just barge in swinging swords and such?”

“An ultimatum, I think. It always sounds good when the poets sing about it later, and it gives them a good excuse to make vague references to Kings that no one has ever heard of, and that keeps them happy, so they don’t secretly circulate cruel satires making fun of you.”

“Good point.” Akcuanrut stepped out into the meadow and shouted up to where the entrance to the Dwarves’ hiding place was located, “Hey, Dvergar! We know where you are! You have five minutes to collect your valuables, leave your weapons behind, and start walking down to this meadow, where we’ll accept your formal surrender!”

As Master Wizard finished speaking, there was a clap of thunder as a tall blonde woman clad in a diaphanous red gown, but with a fistful of golden spears in hand, driving a bright bronze war chariot drawn by two powerful horses that flew down from the sky as she shouted in a clear contralto voice, “Naughty Dvergar of the Nine Worlds! Beware! I am Sól, Goddess of the fiery Sun above your heads, whom you have excellent reason to fear! Surrender instantly or I’ll rain down light and fire to penetrate every secret corner of your pathetic little hidey-hole!” To emphasize her demand, she hurled just one of her spears, which blasted a huge smoking crater into the rocky ledge before the entrance to the Dwarven stronghold, and the basalt edges of the fumarole were glowing brightly red, even in the daylight, slowly slumping, like butter in a hot frying pan, and every eye was riveted to the very real Goddess seemingly parked, or double-parked, in the thin air above the mountain chosen by the hapless dwarves as their impregnable redoubt.

“Wow!” Rhea enthused. “That chick doesn’t mess around, does she? I want her for our team! Do you think we can call ‘dibs?’ ”

“Evidently we won’t have to,” Selene replied, “but where’d she come from?”

“The Nine Worlds, obviously, but why now? We haven’t seen the Æsir take any interest in much of anything besides their little bailiwicks, but here she is as big as life and twice as natural.”

Just then, someone up in the Dwarves’ ‘hideout’ stuck a rag tied to a long stick out the door and called out, “We surrender! We surrender! But we can’t come out until it’s dark!”

The big blonde shouted back pleasantly enough, “No problem! Let me just take care of that little problem for you.” With a negligent wave of her hand, she beckoned heavy clouds into being, until what had been a cloudless sky had a massive thunderhead directly over the Dwarven hideaway, which cast a gloomy shadow over their portion of the mountain, but left the sun shining everywhere else. It looked totally weird, but the rogue Dvergar were sufficiently impressed that they started coming out into the shade, pointedly unarmed, and with their hands held well out to their sides to show that they were empty.

Akcuanrut quickly took charge, opening a portal directly back to the Capital, where they’d set up a large barracks and enclosure for any future prisoners, which they suddenly had in buckets full. Quickly, he ordered the men-at-arms to begin escorting the Dwarves to the portal, and called out to them, “Your surrender is accepted, and your safety guaranteed by the Empress D’Larona-Cohn of Myriad. If you’ll allow my guards to help you, you’ll be taken to a secure facility where we can sort out exactly what to do with you. Your legitimate King, Alvís of Svartálfheimr, is here as well, and stands personal guarantee for your fair treatment on very favorable terms, I think, but you must all exit your hiding place now.”

King Alvís said abruptly, furious with them all, “All of you! Dáinn! Náinn! You miserable pack of scoundrels! Get out of there right now before I send Dvergar warriors in to roust you out at sword’s point!”

The exodus sped up enormously after the King’s outburst, and two of them — possibly Dáinn and Náinn — ran out crying, “Cousin Alvís! Cousin Alvís! We were tricked by the Jötunns! They threatened us! We had to do what they told us to do or they promised to throw us on the grill and eat us!”

“Bah!” the King exclaimed. “Eat you? Not likely, as tough and stringy as I’m sure you’d turn out to be. Rather, you’ve been caught out through your own greed and stupidity. You were never the smartest of the cousins.”

“But it’s not our fault!” they cried, as they were led smartly to the glowing amber portal and pushed toward it. “It’s… all his fault,” they said, pointing at each other, but any further recriminations were cut off abruptly as they were rudely shoved through the opening.

The rest of the Dwarves passed along with much less noise, until finally there were none.

The imposing blonde flicked away the clouds with a negligent movement of her hand, then gave the reins of her team another flick, and trotted down to meet them on the ground, where she paused the team and looped their reins loosely over a hook on the side rail, obviously designed for that very purpose. Then she stepped gracefully out of her chariot and walked over to meet them. “Akcuanrut, Selene, Rhea, and even King Alvís! I’m so terribly sorry that it’s taken so long to get here, but my last certain time reference was on the cliff of Svartálfheimr, and by the time I was able to escape you’d already gone, so it took me quite some time to finally locate you!”

She smiled at Selene particularly. “Hi, Sweetie. Long time, no see,” she said, and Selene fainted dead away.

Rhea said, puzzled, “Phil? Is that you?”

The tall and buxom blonde merely grinned, and Rhea fainted too.

 

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved