Mythos (24 page)

I felt a tapping through the bottom of my foot—Loki had followed me. Whatever it was he wanted, he wanted it pretty bad. I decided I’d better find out what it was and bent toward him. That was when the net went away. Closed up might be more appropriate, since what really happened was the return of the armor. In either case, things got very slippery. I fell on my ass and started sliding toward the abyss.

Before I had gone far, Melchior brought the big blue box down to where I could catch hold of the edge and pull myself inside.

“What happened?” I asked.

“My body just lost its grip on the card. I don’t know why.”

“We’d better go find out.”

I sent my psyche winging back to my body and found myself half-cradled in Tisiphone’s arms.

“We’ve got serious trouble,” she said, as I opened my eyes.

Then she lifted me onto my feet and plucked the athame from my hand. My world filled with purple sparks as my blood pressure headed for the floor, and my body tried to follow it down. I staggered but managed to stay upright by pressing my hip against the railing of the sewer platform. As I did so, I heard Melchior whistling the kludge code that closed the wound in my hand. I also heard the steely ring of swords being drawn.

I shook my head, trying to force the world beyond the purple sparks to make sense. Bad idea. Dizziness grabbed me by the collar and heaved me half-over the rail. I hung on for dear life and vomited into the sewage. Coming back into your body is disorienting in the best of situations when you’ve had plenty of mental preparation. Being rushed back and thrown directly into danger is refined torture.

I heard Tisiphone snarl and the clash of steel on claws. I wrenched myself upright and away from the railing, driving fresh spikes of pain through my athame hand. I didn’t have time to be sick. I found myself facing a scene that could have come from some Renaissance painting of The Pit.

Tisiphone, in the role of fiery-winged fallen angel, stood at the place where the walkway met the platform, a river of raw sewage flowing past on her left. Facing her was a huge bear of a man as naked as she. He had a short axe in each hand and a face twisted by insane rage. Behind him, waiting their chances to meet her, were three more big men clearly of the same breed as the first, though none was naked—Vikings straight from central casting. Farther back still stood Tyr, a shining sword glowing balefully in his left hand, a flanged mace strapped to the stump of his right.

Light and shadow danced wildly as Tyr impatiently flicked his glowing blade from side to side and Tisiphone’s fire waxed and waned with her battle. She and the berserker exchanged a few more blows. Then he tumbled into the sewage in a spray of blood—ripped open from navel to neck by Tisiphone’s claws. The next warrior stepped forward. I had no doubt he would follow his fellow soon enough, as would the two behind him.

Then Tisiphone would be facing the God of War, and that was another thing entirely. I had seen her fight the sister of our own war god, Ares, and win, but that had been with her fellow Furies at her side and Necessity’s backing. In this place and time, a lone Tisiphone was not what she had been then, and I was her only backup. Though I didn’t have much hope, I reached for my sword and pistol. Not my first choice in most situations, but lack of practice with the local pseudobinary had closed a lot of magical doors for me.

“Melchior, see if you can’t figure out how to code us up a boat or—aiee!” I yipped as my right hand closed on something cold and squishy rather than the sword hilt I had expected.

“What’s that supposed to . . . Oh my,” said Melchior.

Independent of my will, my right hand came around in front of my body, holding Laginn by the wrist. In turn, he held my sword-cane. I was still trying to decide what to make of that when I found my whole body being turned to my right, away from the fight between Tisiphone and the next of her attackers. I was only just in time, too, as a second group of Viking warriors had silently come up from the other side of the platform.

Their leader, seeing me watching him, leaped fully onto the platform and swung his short cross-hilted sword at my face. My personal instinct was to fall back a step and use a stop-thrust to force him to keep his distance, but neither my instincts nor my intellect seemed to have much control over my body at the moment. My sword arm dragged me forward, parrying the blow just enough with the base of my blade to make it ride up and over the top of my head. Then, dropping beneath the still-moving arm of my opponent, Occam’s tip went deep into his throat.

Again, action and intent did not match. Rather than stepping back and pulling the blade free to give myself more room, I sank Occam deeper still and twisted my upper body hard to the right, levering the dead man up and over the rail of the platform. By then the next warrior had stepped forward, bringing his own sword straight down at the top of my head. I didn’t have time to bring my own blade back in line. Instead, I slid forward inside his guard, twisting my sword arm up and in so that his descending wrist met Occam’s rising edge.

Almost any other sword would have remade him in the image of Tyr-one-hand then, but Occam merely severed tendons. While Laginn was doing something elaborate to bring my sword back around to where it could do some good, I exerted my will on my left hand. It obeyed me reluctantly and painfully, catching hold of the man’s belt and throwing him backwards into his fellows.

He hit the one immediately behind him hard, and they both went into the shit. That left two, and Laginn dragged me forward into a full-out lunge. I’m stronger and faster than any normal human, but the Laginn-delivered-and-aimed thrust was far beyond anything I could have managed on my own. Occam’s point went straight through the next warrior’s shield, his byrnie, his breastbone, his spine, his byrnie again, the byrnie of the guy behind him,
his
breastbone, and four more inches into his chest cavity. Before I’d had time to process that, I found myself pivoting on the ball of my right foot while simultaneously bringing up my left and bracing it against the shield I’d just skewered.

I watched myself in amazement as I used the leverage of my left leg and my twisting body to pull the sword free of the two corpses, a task significantly harder than delivering the initial thrust. It wasn’t so much that Laginn made me stronger, as that the hand seemed to be able to direct and deliver every iota of strength I possessed in a much more efficient fashion. Before the bodies had even finished falling away, I had pivoted again—led by my sword—to face back toward Tyr and Tisiphone.

As my feet slid into a ready stance, Laginn raised Occam so that the sword drew a perfectly straight line from my right eye to Tyr’s left. The last of the Vikings on that side had fallen as well. Now the war god and the Fury sized each other up across the narrow gap between them.

As I looked at Tyr along the edge of my sword, I felt a pulse of pure hatred come through the palm of my hand where it touched Laginn. It was the first emotion I’d felt through our temporary linkage, and it was so strong it overwhelmed everything else in my head. I
was
Laginn’s hatred for Tyr.

Before I could do anything more than hate, Tyr and Tisiphone suddenly leaped together. I can’t begin to describe their exchange. Too much happened too fast. Sword, mace hand, and four sets of Fury claws whipped through impossibly fast arcs and thrusts, meeting, clashing, and rebounding with incredible force and precision. In ten seconds, ten times that many blows were exchanged. I felt Laginn straining against some internal barrier, wanting to join the fight and yet unwilling at the same time. Somewhere down under all of that hate I felt the same way.

Then, just as quickly and unexpectedly as they had started, Tisiphone and Tyr sprang apart, reestablishing the distance between themselves. Tisiphone had been driven back and Tyr stood on the edge of the platform. Both were bleeding. Tisiphone from a deep slice on the back of her left calf. Tyr from three parallel claw marks running from just in front of his right ear down onto his chin. An angry red claw nick on his Adam’s apple showed just how close the blow had come to tearing out his throat. The clash had also broken the anchoring post for the platform’s railing and several of the fingers on Tisiphone’s right hand.

Tyr, holding his sword in a high guard before him, took another step onto the platform, and Tisiphone backed away warily. That was when Laginn struck. Jerking me forward, the hand drove my blade straight at the war god’s face. Tyr’s own sword came down and across in a parry faster than my eyes could follow. But Occam wasn’t there, having dropped like a stone into a drawing cut aimed at Tyr’s slightly advanced right foot. The thrust had been a feint, though even I hadn’t known it until the true attack was delivered.

Tisiphone struck at the same time, driving a spinning kick at the war god’s side. He blocked that with his mace, but that necessity made him just a little bit slower than he might otherwise have been in getting out of my way. I’m not sure who was more amazed when my blade bit through the top of his boot and drew a short, shallow cut in Tyr’s flesh—me or the war god. He hopped back a half step then, really looking at me for the first time. His eyes narrowed when they touched the hand I held in my own.

“Raven,” he said, his voice harsh and dangerous, “I think you have something there that belongs to me. Give it to me.”

The pulses of hate coming from Laginn grew even stronger.

Words I did not formulate came to my lips. “The trash you abandoned to the wolf’s belly, you mean? I think not. It belongs to you no more than the scraps you throw your hounds. Less, even, since a good master feeds his hounds as the natural order of things. No, this hand is not yours, though once you wore it. When you betrayed it and left it to die, you renounced your claim.”

Tyr looked as though he’d been slapped. Not bring-you-to-your-senses slapped either, this was more a glove-to-the-face-declaring-a-duel sort of slapped. I wasn’t particularly happy about Laginn putting me in such a position, but I suppose it really didn’t make things much worse than they had been a moment before. And frankly, I was unhappy about a whole bunch of stuff. Most of it the result of my interactions with the damned insane Norse pantheon. I really had to find some way to get back to my own family’s more familiar insanities.

“That was not a wise Impulse,” said Tyr, hammering the final word, and really that was the last straw for me.

Despite any evidence to the contrary, I was not anything like Odin’s third raven. Not in nature. Not in actions. Not in function. I’d had it. My own anger broke through Laginn’s control.

“I’m sorry, Tyr,” I said. “What do you want me to say? ‘If you love something, feed it to the wolves’? ‘If it comes back and tries to cut your heart out, it was never yours’? Let’s face it, whatever your motivations, you gave your hand to the enemy. Can you blame it if it decides you don’t have its best interests at heart after that?”

“Give me the hand.”

“Come and take it,” Laginn said in my voice.

“How about I just give you the finger,” I added, suiting action to words with my free hand.

I didn’t even see the cut Tyr aimed at my right knee. But then, I didn’t see the parry Laginn used to block it either, so it all worked out. I had thought that watching the interchange between Tyr and Tisiphone was confusing, but what transpired among the four of us over the next several seconds made that earlier round of the fight seem like the steps of a well-known dance by comparison.

Laginn’s skills were the war god’s own. Though Laginn was severely hampered by the limitations of my merely demidivine body, it seemed to anticipate Tyr’s every action and counter it before it could be completed. After one particularly astonishing parry done backwards and between my legs, I began to suspect that Laginn was in some way still a part of Tyr, that the hand could actually read the god’s mind.

Tisiphone had taken advantage of Tyr’s angry focus on me and his former hand to perform her chameleon trick, making herself essentially invisible. Between her and Laginn—I was basically just along for the ride—we should have been winning. We weren’t. We were losing. Slowly, and with a great deal of style, but losing all the same. Damned gods!

The problem was that Tyr, whatever his personal disadvantages in the present situation, was still the local God of War and Personal Combat.

Basically, the universe wanted him to win, and we were going to die if we couldn’t short-circuit the process. By
we
, of course, I meant
me
, since Tisiphone and Laginn were plenty busy as it was, and Melchior was way out of his weight class here. I tried to split things up, letting Laginn have full control of my body and motor functions while I reasserted my ownership of my frontal lobes.

It was hard. The human brain—and mine is basically indistinguishable from human in this respect—is pretty much hardwired to pay attention to things that look like they might kill you. Anyone who’s ever gotten on a roller coaster and then wished they hadn’t can verify that. That’s because any potential ancestors you might have had who
didn’t
keep an eye out for such things tended to die before they got a chance to play the descendant sweepstakes.

The resultant internal dialogue went something like this:
We can’t truly beat him. . . . Can we temporarily defeat him? Aiee! Sword plus neck equal bad! Aiee! Duck! Duck! Duck! Parry? All right, parry is good. Let’s see. . . . Temporary defeat, engineering of same and
—
Oh my. . . . Whew. Nice dodge, Laginn! Swords won’t do it, maybe magic? Yeah, that’s the
—
Aiee! Ow, ow, ow, I hope that’s not going to bleed like I think it’s going to bleed. Magic, magic, magic . . . Crap, I’m getting tired.
Etc.

Condensing: So, magic. Spraying chaos in Tyr’s face had temporarily blinded him earlier, but I didn’t really feel like stabbing myself in the chest with Occam again. Besides, it would lack the element of surprise the second time around, and that might prove fatal. What I really needed was a distraction, followed by a hasty retreat. I glanced out over the river of shit, and suddenly an idea occurred. It was a bad idea, and it would require a good bit of unprompted cooperation from Tisiphone, Melchior, and Laginn, but we didn’t have a whole lot of time or options.