I’m not sure about the Tall Man’s ghost—that’s one of those urban legends where everyone knows someone whose friend’s cousin’s brother knew a kid who saw the Tall Man and died three days later. Garm, however, is another matter.
“Hold fast,” Mikill advised me unnecessarily, gunning the engine again as he departed from the graded trails.
The dune buggy flew and jounced over the sands. Dune grass whipped at the sides of the vehicle. I narrowed my eyes as a hail of icy pellets from the frost giant’s dripping beard stung my face. Ahead of us, there was a deep-throated howl.
I poked around at my feet. “Mikill? Where’s the offering?”
“There is a loaf of bread in the rear of the vehicle!” Mikill shouted, both hands gripping the steering wheel hard. “You must reach behind you to retrieve it!”
Another howl arose, drowning out the sound of the engine.
Oh, great. Again.
Holding the fur coat in place with one hand, I rummaged awkwardly behind me with the other. Easy enough for a frost giant to do, but I could barely brush the crusty surface of the loaf of bread with my fingertips.
At fifty yards away, Yggdrasil II loomed out of the darkness like a colossus. A piece of the darkness seemed to detach from it, bounding toward the dune buggy, yellow eyes aflame.
“Daisy Johanssen!” Mikill called. “Now!”
“Yeah, yeah! Just don’t crash, okay?” Reluctantly, I released the catch on my seat belt, craning my upper body backward. The buggy bounced on its oversize tires, and the top of my head hit the roll bar. “Ouch!”
Garm howled, a long, belling peal, the sound of a hunting dog on the trail, if the hunting dog had an awesome sound system.
“Now!” Mikill repeated impatiently. “I do not wish to do battle with the hound.”
Lurching, I managed to get my hand around the loaf. “Got it!”
The frost giant slowed and downshifted as Garm bounded toward us, jaws slavering. The hellhound was approximately twice the size of the buggy. Why it attacked the very denizens of Hel’s realm of Niflheim it was meant to protect, and why it was pacified by a loaf of bread, I could not tell you. I asked the first time and was told that was simply the way it was. Happens a lot in the eldritch community.
“Good doggy, good boy,” I said encouragingly. “Want a treat?” Garm halted, regarding the loaf of bread with flaming yellow eyes. I hurled it as far as I could. “There you go!”
And like that, Garm the hellhound took off after the bread, bounding into the dune grass, where a contented snuffling and munching sound arose.
“Well done,” Mikill said.
I dragged my arm over my forehead, wiping away anxious sweat and frost-giant residue. “What did I say last time, Mikill? Put the bread up front!”
He glanced at me. “Forgive me. I had forgotten the lack of stature that comes of human blood.”
I sighed. “Just drive.”
Mikill put the buggy in gear. “Keep your limbs well inside the vehicle during the descent.”
He wasn’t kidding.
I’ve never been to California, but I’ve seen pictures of giant redwoods with a hollow so big you could drive a car through it. Yggdrasil II was bigger. You could drive a car into it.
Which is exactly what we did.
The path to Niflheim spiraled downward and downward, hewn into the living wood inside the trunk of Yggdrasil II itself. How far down it went, I couldn’t say. Local legends say the town of Singapore settled deep beneath the sands during the earthquake of 1914. They don’t say how deep.
I kept my elbows tucked firmly at my sides, ignoring the curving wall of heartwood rushing past me inches from my face.
An icy mist arose from the distant realm below. The deeper we went, the colder it got. Mikill stopped dripping, his icicled hair and beard hardening with crackling sounds.
Shivering, I huddled under the fur coat.
At last we reached the bottom, emerging beneath a vast canopy of spreading roots tended to by the three Norns, who drew water in wooden buckets from a deep wellspring beneath the very center of the canopy and poured it lovingly over the massive, fibrous roots. One of them glanced at me as we passed, smiling. She looked like a kindly old grandmother, except her nails were long and curved like talons.
“Ma’am—” I began to call out to her, hoping for a little soothsaying as long as I was here.
Shaking her head, she laid a taloned finger against her lips.
The frost giant grunted and gassed the dune buggy. “They have no counsel for you, Daisy Johanssen.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “To undertake a hero’s quest, you must first become a hero. That is the way it is.”
See what I mean?
There’s not a lot to the buried town of Singapore, also known as Niflheim II or Little Niflheim, or, if you’re feeling really flippant safely aboveground in the daylight, Deadwood. Basically, it’s one road and a handful of buildings. Thanks to the stabilizing presence of Yggdrasil II’s root system, as well as the prodigious efforts of the duegars, or Old Norse dwarves, it’s . . . well, stable.
It’s also dark, cold, and misty.
The dune buggy’s headlights cut through the mist. Mikill pulled up beside the abandoned sawmill that served as Hel’s headquarters and killed the engine. “We have arrived,” he announced.
I climbed out of the buggy and shrugged into the fur coat. Its long sleeves hung well below my hands, and its hem trailed on the ground, making me feel like a little kid playing dress-up. Still, it was better than freezing.
Mikill ushered me into the dark, cavernous interior of the sawmill, the only light source patches of glowing lichen on the walls. I actually see pretty well in the dark, but it takes my eyes a minute to adjust.
“Daisy Johanssen.” A sepulchral voice tolled out of the murky dimness. “Welcome, my young liaison.”
I took a knee and bowed my head. “Thank you, my lady.”
“Rise.”
I obeyed.
The goddess Hel was seated on a throne made from immense saw blades salvaged from the abandoned mill and repurposed through the cunning of dwarfish craftsmanship. It was hard to look at her, or at least half of her. The right side of Hel was fair and beautiful, a white-skinned woman with a clear, smooth brow and a benevolent gaze. The left side of Hel was black and withered, like a charred and burned corpse, only it was a black so dense it seemed to drink in what little light there was. In a sunken eye socket, her other eye glowed like an ember. A handful of shadowy attendants stood beside her throne.
“It has come to my attention that a mortal boy has died,” Hel said. “And you are making inquiries among my subjects.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Her ember eye closed in one long, slow blink. “Is one of them complicit in the boy’s death?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I know there are ghouls involved, but I don’t know how or why. One of them attacked me tonight.”
“It is very important that you uncover the truth, Daisy Johanssen.”
“I’m trying, my lady.” I held out my hands, my long sleeves dangling. “Do you have any counsel for me?”
Hel was silent a moment. “Ghouls. What do you know of ghouls, young one? It is an unkind name that the age of modernity has accorded them.”
“Not much,” I admitted. “I know they subsist on human emotion, and they’re more or less immortal.”
She inclined her head. “In a sense, they are tragic figures. They are beings who were once ordinary mortal humans, slain at the height of great passion and rejected by heaven and hell alike. Because they are immortal creatures born of surpassing passion, they require emotion to sustain their existence. I possess an imperfect knowledge of the particulars, for they did not exist in my own cosmology. But it is true that they can no longer be killed by mortal means. It is well that you know this.”
I swallowed. “Am I . . . Are you saying I’m going to have to kill ghouls, my lady?”
The fair side of Hel’s mouth curved in a faint smile, while the wizened, charred side didn’t move. Creepy, yet at the same time, oddly reassuring. “I am not omniscient, Daisy Johanssen. Such is not my gift. The time has come when you may venture into danger in my service. I would be remiss if I did not offer you a measure of protection.” Raising her black, shriveled left hand, Hel beckoned, and a pale blue frost giantess stepped forward, a bright, shiny little dagger lying across both her cupped hands. She offered it reverently to the goddess, and Hel’s claw closed around the hilt. “Dauda-dagr.”
I blinked. “I beg your pardon, my lady?”
“It means ‘death day.’” She surveyed the dagger, the length of it etched with runes, then reversed it, grasping the blade. “When first you swore yourself into my service, I marked you with the hand of life, did I not?”
My left palm itched, and I closed my hand into a fist beneath my sleeve. Almost a year ago, Hel had traced the rune onto it with her forefinger, her right forefinger. Ansuz, the rune of the messenger, the liaison between worlds. “Yes, my lady. You did.”
Proffering the dagger’s leather-wrapped hilt, Hel extended her left arm. It hung in the murky, misty air like a dead tree branch. “Tonight, I offer you a gift from the hand of death.” This time, it was the ruined left side of her mouth that lifted in a grim rictus. Definitely so not reassuring. “Dauda-dagr can slay even the immortal undead.”
“Oh?” The word came out sort of squeaky.
“Come and take it from me, Daisy Johanssen.” There was a hint of impatience in Hel’s voice.
“Um . . . okay.” I made myself approach the throne, putting one foot in front of the other, trying not to trip over the hem of my fur coat. Hel sat motionless, her right eye closed, long lashes curling gracefully. “You’re sure about this, my lady?”
Her ember eye gave me a baleful glare. “Take it!”
Pushing back my overlong sleeves, I grasped the dagger’s hilt and felt a frisson of pure cold pass through the weapon as Hel relinquished it.