Mythos (5 page)

With a silent curse, I followed her example. There was something about the man that told me I’d rather he didn’t notice me, especially not at a moment when I was no more than mouse-sized by his standards. He was very lean and very tall, though slightly shorter than our own perch. He seemed strong and vigorous despite deep lines in his face and long gray hair. His clothes were also gray. He had on hiking boots and the kind of zip-off slacks that serious travelers often wear, a button-down shirt with extra pockets, a long, full dusterlike jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat that hid his eyes in shadow.

He had a trekking pole of the sort that can double for a camera monopod, its bottom tipped with a wicked spike, though he didn’t lean on it until he reached the place where the chaos puddle had burned a hole in the ground. Even then, I didn’t think he really needed its help as he lowered himself to look at the spot. He squatted there so long I thought he might take root, which gave me my first real chance to have a more general look around.

Behind the man, the lawn stretched southward to a small cottagelike building scaled in proportion to my normal size, the ticket booth of this strange tourist attraction. To the left, where the sun was almost touching the horizon, a large hedge hid most of the nearly empty parking lot. To the right I could see several more buildings, including an inn, some sort of manor, and what appeared to be St. Giles Church—all built to different scales. It was one of the odder vistas I’d ever encountered, especially as I was somewhere in the neighborhood of three inches tall at the moment.

I was still trying to make sense of it all when the man stood and crossed to examine the silvery cord that continued to slide past. As he did so, the trekking pole seemed to blur for an instant, revealing another shape underneath, a staff or spear perhaps. Who was this guy? With a deep, unhappy sigh, he started to follow the line of the leash, or whatever it was. He was walking fast, and as soon as he’d passed beyond immediate sight, Ahllan stood up.

“I hoped he’d show up.” She sighed. “We’d better hurry if we want to see the rest of this.”

“Hang on a second, Ahllan,” said Melchior. “We need to find out what happened to you, why you’re here, all that stuff.”

“You will,” she said, “but it’s going to have to wait just a little bit longer. In the local scheme of things, that fellow is as important as Zeus is back home, maybe more so. We need to take every opportunity to see what he’s up to. Having him here on my home ground is too good a chance to let slip.”

Then she whistled a quick bit of pseudobinary that turned the steps into a slide and leaped aboard. Given the choice of remaining behind or following her once again, we followed. When we reached the ground floor, she led the way to an enormous—to us—electrical outlet set in the back wall of the cathedral.

“Take my hand; we’re going to need to gate.”

I put Melchior on my shoulder and put my right hand in Ahllan’s left. This time I listened very closely to the code Ahllan whistled. I knew what was coming, some form of gate spell using the local power grid as a substitute for the connection between two points normally provided by the mweb network.

I still couldn’t make sense of it. The rhythms were right, though the length of the spell was wildly off, and it just didn’t parse for me. Ahllan was a webtroll, and her ability to spit out fast binary was greater by far than my own talents at deciphering it, but that didn’t explain all my problems, not by a long shot.

I didn’t have any time to stop for analysis either. As soon as we arrived at the other end of the gate, Ahllan started running again, this time leading us up the stairs of a round stone tower. We emerged on the parapets of . . .

“Is this really the Tower of London?” I whispered. “At the same scale as York Minster?”

“Yes, and no. Now, hush.” She pointed into the court-yard below.

There, the big poodle had the hand at bay in the doorway of the Bloody Tower. His master lay in the dirt of the path nearby. The poodle growled once, then pounced. It was a beautiful leap, and it should have landed him squarely on the hand. But the silvery leash suddenly went tight, stopping him in midair. With a crash, the poodle landed flat on his back a few feet short of the hand, which took the opportunity to make a break for it, scuttling out of sight around a corner. A bare half second later, the gray man entered the scene through a gate in the other direction. He held a bit of the silvery cord.

“I’d untangle my hand if I wanted to keep it, Loki,” said the gray man.

“You’re not going to send him back again, are you?” asked the man on the ground, though he was already unwrapping the cord from his wrist.

Loki?
Damn it, why was that name familiar?

“Of course I’m going to send him back. That’s the whole point of binding the wolf in the first place—keeping him tied up.”

What wolf? All I saw was a very unhappy-looking upside-down poodle.

“But he gets so hungry for company,” said Loki, sounding genuinely sad.

“And you’re his father, and you love him so much you can’t bear to see him that way. I know this song and dance by heart. You’re the prince of lies, Loki. Your mouth moves, but any truth that falls out does so by accident. I’ll listen to none of it. Good-bye, Fenris.”

Fenris? Loki? I’d run across those names in a class or something, back when Lachesis had sent me to a human university. Something mythological. Norse gods? Yeah, that was it. There was just one problem: according to everything I knew about the way the multiverse worked, there were no Norse gods. They didn’t exist. Unlike Zeus and the rest of my extended family, the Norse pantheon was an enormous and elaborate falsehood, which was why I’d paid so little attention to the topic when it came up in class.

The gray man started to snap the fingers of his right hand, only instead of the sharp “cracks” I expected, the movement produced a series of “booms” like drums, and not just one or two, but dozens, an entire orchestral drum section. The out-of-proportion complexity of it reminded me of the self-harmonizing spell-whistles used by some of the true gods and the most powerful magical computers. Magic far beyond the reach of lesser powers—me, for example.

If the drumming had an equivalent effect, the gray man was actually a gray god. One I didn’t recognize. Since I’m related to pretty much all the gods there are, it lent weight to the idea of a viable Norse mythos. Which in turn meant something was very, very wrong with the multiverse. That, or my education about it.

The gray god finished his snapping. In response, the dog’s leash started retracting. It dragged the resigned-looking dog backwards across the ground, picking up speed as it went and moving steadily faster and faster until both leash and dog vanished across the drawbridge.

Loki had regained his feet by then. Patting himself once, he magically removed the dust from his clothes.

“You didn’t need to play it so harsh, Odin. You’re ham-handed. You know that, right? I could have sent him back to his island prison with no more than a whisper in his ear.”

Odin? Really? The king of the Norse gods? Where
am
I?

“A whisper in his ear and his bonds looking tight, I’m sure,” answered Odin. “But I’d rather his bonds
were
tight instead of just looking that way. Now, what do you think I should do with you?”

“With me?” asked Loki, sounding completely innocent. “Whatever for?” What Odin almost certainly couldn’t see from his vantage was the way Loki’s left hand had slipped into his back pocket, pulling forth a single shiny bit of scale. “I’ve done nothing outside my purview.”

“Perhaps not,” replied Odin. “Perhaps freeing the very soul of demonic hunger is entirely within your job description. If that’s so, then my job description certainly involves punishing you when you do things so detrimental to me and mine.”

“You know what, old man—not only are you ham-handed; you’re also a bloody-minded tyrant and a monopolist to boot, always trying to grind the honest competition under your heel. That poor creature had done nothing to you. He never has. You imprisoned him for what he might someday do, nothing more. Is that justice?”

As he spoke, Loki stomped over to the gate through which the poodle had vanished, putting him on the far side of the older god.

“Are you done yet?” asked Odin.

“One last thing,” said Loki and now he looked over his glasses at Odin. “Good-bye!”

The scale flashed, and Loki leaped. Halfway through an arc that dropped him into the stream that doubled for the Thames in this Tower replica, he turned into a huge red salmon with chaos in its eyes. Just before he went into the water, he winked in Odin’s direction.

“Damn!” I said, then threw myself flat as Odin turned his head our way.

Before I’d dropped below the level of the crenellations, I got my second eye-surprise in as many seconds. The first was that, without the lenses of his glasses between us, Loki’s eyes were orbs of the local version of the Primal Chaos—very like my friend Eris. The second was that Odin possessed only one orb, confirming my vague memories from class.

Something pulled on my ankle then, and I glanced down the length of my body to see Ahllan. She didn’t look particularly happy as she jerked her chin toward the stairhead and started crawling that way. Raising myself onto fingers and toes, I followed after her. We moved quickly, and luck or something was with us, because Odin didn’t pop up to have a word with us before we got out of sight.

As we approached the outlet at the bottom of the stairs a rat briefly challenged us, and I couldn’t help but note that it seemed much smaller than it should have, given our resizing for the cathedral. Ahllan bared her fangs and growled before I had time to decide between drawing Occam or my automatic—the Burkett CQB version of the classic 1911 model .45. In response the rat departed for parts elsewhere at speed. I couldn’t blame it. Ahllan looks like she could tear me in two by grabbing one ankle in each hand and pulling, and she probably could despite my greater-than-human strength. Of course, she’s also a vegetarian, a healer, and one of the gentlest souls I know, but nobody had explained that to the rat.

“Why was it so small?” I asked after it scampered away.

“Wait one minute more,” replied the troll, taking my hand in her own.

I nodded and made sure I had a good grip on Melchior as Ahllan whistled the spell that would take us elsewhere. A split second later, we arrived back at York Miniature—as I was starting to think of it. From the back of the cathedral, she led us along the north wall to the transept and from there to the chapter house, an octagonal subbuilding that stood at the cathedral’s northeast corner.

Inside an area the size of a small circus tent—at least in relation to our current scale—Ahllan had set up housekeeping. She pointed Melchior and me at a circular arrangement of chairs not too far from her little kitchen. Beyond, a curtained-off area held a small futon platform-bed and a battered dresser.

“Sit,” she said. “You may be able to run around like that without recharging, but I’m well past the age where I can do so. I’ll make tea and toasted cheese sandwiches, and we can talk and eat.”

I set Melchior on the nearest overstuffed chair and flopped lengthwise on the couch. Where to start?

“The rat,” I said.

“That’s a function of the gate spell I’m using.” Ahllan grinned as she set the kettle on the burner. “It’s pretty clever, actually. The obsessive who built this park didn’t feel any need to keep everything to the same scale. When I set things up for quick gating between miniatures, I built in automatic scaling. York Minster’s at one-twentieth scale, The Tower’s closer to one-eighth, so three and a half inches here is a bit under nine inches over there.”

“That leads to my next question: where the hell are we?”

“Proximate, or cosmic?” countered Ahllan.

“Both,” said Melchior. “Proximate first.”

“Prince Edward Island, Canada, at one of the world’s truly bizarre tourist attractions, Forestdown Estates, home to dozens of miniatures of important English buildings. Fortunately, you’ve arrived in the lull after the summer season, when they close the park down to take a vacation, or we’d have to contend with innocent bystanders of the fragile human variety. On a grander scale”—she shrugged—“I have no idea. This place, this universe shouldn’t exist. It goes against everything I believed about reality.”

That was saying a lot; Ahllan had once been webtroll to the Fate Atropos. She’d been part of the system that maintained the mweb and kept track of where all the myriad Earths were in relation to one another and Olympus. She’d been designed from the ground up to understand and maintain the basic structure of the multiverse. That really upped the ante riding on the answer to the question of
how
we’d gotten here, too.

Melchior whistled—a note of surprise rather than a spell. “That’s a big bite to swallow all at once. Do you think you could break it up a bit?”

“Maybe.” Ahllan picked up a small tray with some cookies and juice on it and brought it over to the coffee table. “As far as I can tell, there’s a whole cluster of Decision Loci that are not now and never have been connected to the mweb. This world is one of them. Whether they lie in parallel to our own multiverse, or are something like a separate partition on the hard drive of reality, I can’t say.”

She handed us each a plate with several cookies. “What I do know is that the gods here are Norse, not Greek, and that, other than that, the situation is pretty close to our own mainline version of Earth, with all the same major features in terms of people and cultures. The Canadian prime minister is even the same as in that world where Cerice was going to grad school.” She tightened her heavy jaw for a moment. “Shara told me I’d be safe here right before she pushed me through the gate she used to send me here. I’d like to have a word or two with her about that.”