Mythos (25 page)

So, first a distraction . . . What sort of spell could I use? Fire? Ice? Chaos burst? It had to be something big, but not so big that Melchior couldn’t handle the complexity of the pseudobinary. . . . Wait a second. I realized then just how much I’d let Laginn’s worldview dominate my own over the last few minutes. Dumb. Very. Just because Tyr and his former hand saw things in terms of swords and shields and magic didn’t mean I had to. I also didn’t have to rely on Melchior.

As Laginn dragged me through another series of thrusts and parries with my right hand, I took control of my left to unzip my jacket and reach inside . . . and found the pistol I’d been going for when Laginn took control of my body and about two-thirds of my brain. I popped the release with my thumb and drew the .45—it’s rigged for right-hand draw, but I’ve practiced it both ways for situations not unlike the present one. It was a good thing I’d invested the time, since the barely sealed athame wound made me clum sier than usual. The 1911 model Colt is also at root a right-handed pistol, so I had to flick the safety off with my trigger finger rather than my thumb, but again, practice paid off.

The sound of the gun firing in the artificial cave of the sewer was deafening. I think it was the noise as much as the impact of the bullets that threw Tyr off his game. Whatever the reason, he staggered back against the wall and slid to the ground. Laginn immediately took advantage of the moment to thrust Occam deep into the war god’s left shoulder.

While the hand was doing that, I was focusing my own attention inward, reaching for the shadow of the Raven. Even as I pulled my other shape over me like a cloak woven from threads of agony, Tyr brought his sword around and down. It struck Occam a few inches below the handle and snapped the blade. At which point he shifted the angle of his cut, aiming for my thigh.

It was a masterful piece of sword work, and if I’d still possessed my normal shape, he’d have severed my leg. As it was, the blade neatly lopped the tip off my middle toe. It hurt—though no more than the shape-shift itself—and I would have to do something about the bleeding at some point. In the meantime, I grabbed at the broken end of Occam in Tyr’s shoulder with my left foot, using it as a lever to spin me in the air. Then, with a beat of my wings, I launched myself out over the river of sewage, pulling the blade loose and calling for the others to follow as I went.

A tearing pain sliced across my tail as I flapped forward through the air, and I clipped my wounded foot on the railing, almost tumbling into the shit. Somehow, despite all that, I stayed aloft and even managed to turn before I smashed into the far wall—the sewer had barely enough free space for a bird of my size to fly. Add to that the hand clinging to my right wing by two fingers and the loss of some portion of my tail feathers, and not crashing became a much more involved process.

Still, I had to risk a glance back toward the platform before I’d gone ten feet. Then I heaved an enormous sigh of relief. Tisiphone, Melchior clutched in her uninjured hand, was right behind me. That she might not follow, or not think to grab Melchior, had been my biggest fear. Either event would have forced me to change my plan.

“Now what?” Tisiphone yelled after thirty seconds, when a couple of bends separated us from where we had left Tyr.

“Fly as far as we can, then swim the rest of the way, I guess.” I didn’t have a better answer.

Fortunately, I didn’t turn out to need one. Sanitation in Asgard followed a more traditional model than that dictated by modern standards, and the sewer emptied directly into a large river. We quickly crossed the sun-touched water, then flew a mile or two into the wood beyond. We’d have gone farther still if I hadn’t been bleeding rather a lot by then and growing increasingly dizzy.

I landed hard and not well. Turns out that tail feathers are helpful for braking as well as staying in the air. The chaos magic involved in returning to my normal shape was intense enough to stop the immediate bleeding, but I was still missing most of a toe, and I had a hell of a cut running all the way across my ass. Melchior started sewing up the latter not long after we landed, but I knew I wasn’t going to have much fun with either sitting or walking for a while.

“You’ve got to get better at this whole flying-away-from-the-enemy thing,” said Melchior as he put in another stitch.

“Gosh, thanks, Mel, that would never have occurred to me. I don’t suppose you have any ideas on that front?”

“Actually, I might have one or two, but I’m still working out the details. Hold still.”

I didn’t respond. Instead, I ran a quick inventory of the situation to distract myself from both the pain and the indignity of my current position. It didn’t bring me much joy. In addition to my bigger injuries, I was bleeding from a half dozen shallow cuts and pretty much covered in bruises. I’d also pulled more muscles than I knew I owned. . . . Well, Laginn had been the one to pull them, but that wasn’t really the point. I was going to be getting very stiff very soon.

Tisiphone was better off, but not enormously so. Her pale skin was patterned with a vivid motley of blue-and-yellow bruises, small cuts, and scrapes. More seriously, she’d taken a nasty sword thrust to the right hip on top of the deep slice in her calf and a handful of broken fingers. None of that would have been more than a momentary irritation at home, but here, where she healed so much more slowly . . . She was hurting badly enough that she’d allowed Melchior to give her a shot of magically produced morphine before he splinted her left hand—Better Living Through Chemistry was one of the most often used spells in his inventory and had received more of his limited practice time because of that.

Melchior himself had mostly stayed out of the direct fighting and was basically all right. He’d even managed to salvage both the networking card and my athame, though I’d lost three guns in two days. And Occam . . . I looked once again at the hilt Laginn had saved with its stub of blade and sighed before slipping it back into its cane-sheath with the rest of the blade. It had been awfully nice to own a magic sword, if only for a little while.

Melchior was just finishing his stitchery when a brazen hunting horn called a high, clear note somewhere behind us. Another followed, and another, and more yet, building into a wild chorus, which was soon joined by the joyous baying of a whole host of hounds. The branches of the trees started whipping around then, driven by the winds that rose in tandem with the horns and the hounds. Long streaks of gray cloud formed, unrolling to great lengths like ragged-edged banners.

“You don’t suppose that’s got anything to do with us, do you?” said Melchior, his tone mock-hopeful.

I raised an eyebrow at him and started pulling my pants back up. It hurt despite the shot Melchior had given me.

He shrugged. “Can’t blame a goblin for wishing, can you?”

Tisiphone shook her head, her eyes sad. “A hunt is called, and I’m on the wrong end of it.”

“You can say that again, sister.” A rather large fox stepped from the undergrowth off to our left. “The part about the wrong end, I mean.” He gave us an appraising look. “What an odd lot you are. Not that it’s going to matter for very much longer, not with Odin raising the Wild Hunt against you.”

“The Wild Hunt,” I said, genuinely aghast. “That’s just fantastic.” I finished buttoning my pants and reached for my boots. “The effing Wild Hunt. Why don’t they just call in a tactical nuke and be done with it?”

In the background, the sounds of the hunt started their climb into the sky.

Tisiphone touched my shoulder. “It’s not that bad. I’ve ridden with Artemis often enough to know the quarry occasionally gets away.” She tilted her head to one side. “Well, it does in our world at any rate.”

“Artemis?” asked the fox, obviously puzzled.

“Goddess of the Hun—ow, ow, ow.” I yipped as I pulled my right boot over my injured foot—I was going to miss that toe. “At least she is in our world. Who’s in charge here?”

The fox looked even more confused at that. “You’re kidding, right . . . ? No. I can see you aren’t. Well, here’s a clue; it ain’t called Odin’s Hunt for nothing. Savvy?”

Melchior groaned. “Can we run away now, Boss?”

“Yeah, I think that’s pretty much what the script calls for at this point. The question is: Where do we run?”

The fox cleared its throat. “I might be able to help you there.”

I gave him a closer, harder look, checking to see whether he had Loki’s eyes. He didn’t, and Tisiphone’s careful sniffing of him didn’t result in any objections on her part. I still didn’t trust him, but the sounds of the Hunt began to move closer, and we didn’t have a lot of options.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why would you help us?”

“Gift horse, mouth, never looking in same,” replied the fox. “Does the phrase mean anything to you?”

“Yes, that whoever coined it never had to pay for the upkeep of a bum horse. I’ll see your horse-saying and raise you a pig in a poke.”

“Oink, oink, oink,” said the fox. “Going once . . .”

“Why, damn it?”

“Going twice.”

“I don’t believe this,” said Melchior.

“Last chance,” said the fox. “You can take the deal my way or not at all.”

I didn’t move. The fox shrugged and half turned away.

As the horns came even closer he glanced skyward. “It’s your funeral, bud.”

I swore bitterly under my breath, then nodded. “Fine, have it your way.”

We really didn’t have a choice.

“Follow me,” said the fox, his voice almost relieved.

He took off, and we had to jog to keep up. Well, everyone else jogged. I did something much closer to hobbling with great vigor. The fox led us into a stream, where we walked about a hundred yards against the current, soon reaching a small waterfall.

“The entrance is low and on the right.” The fox pointed toward the waterfall with his nose before ducking under the surface.

He didn’t resurface.

“I’ll go first,” offered Melchior. “I don’t need to breathe.” He ducked under the water and vanished as well.

Tisiphone—who could no doubt hold her breath for hours—followed a moment later, sending up a cloud of steam as her fires touched the water. It vanished quickly, torn by the raging wind and lost against the clouds that continued to grow, but I didn’t want to stick around and find out if it drew any attention. With Laginn clinging to my ankle I dived after her. The passage was narrow and about three feet under the water. It was also fairly long, and the icy cold of the water seemed to sink fangs into the fresh wounds on my foot and ass. I’d started to really worry that I might run out of air when I finally saw the end of the run—a deep and wide pool, its surface illuminated by Tisiphone’s fires above.

As my head broke the surface, I decided I really needed to learn a couple more shapes besides the Raven—an otter, maybe, or a dolphin. The pool was at one end of a low limestone cave. The smooth walls and floor suggested that the stream might once have run through there rather than over the waterfall. The odor of wet dog hung heavy in the air.

“You’re shivering,” Tisiphone said as I came out of the water. “Come here and get warm.”

I joined her and the others at the highest, driest point of the cave. She wrapped her arms and wings around me from behind, resting her head on my shoulder. Within moments, steam from my wet clothes began to rise around my face, partially obscuring my view of the cave but also making me feel much better. A thought occurred, and I laughed.

“What?” she asked with a grin in her voice. “It’s been a while since you’ve smiled, much less laughed. I’ve missed both.”

I decided not to point out that neither our current situation nor the situation back home, where we were at odds over Necessity, lent itself to merriment.

Instead, I said, “There’s a lot to be said for partnering a lady who can double as both space heater and night-light.”

“How very romantic you are, my dear. Every woman wants to hear herself described in such a forthright and practical way.” Then Tisiphone laughed, too, though not before nipping my ear rather harder than affection called for.

Melchior rolled his eyes at us, and the fox looked almost as pained. Which reminded me . . .

“Okay, so now that the pressure’s off I’m going to ask again: Why are you helping us? While we’re at it, why don’t you want to tell us why?”

“Would you believe it’s all my way of protesting against fox hunts? Solidarity to those who face the hounds and all that?” I gave him the hairy eyeball. “No?” He shrugged. “Somehow I didn’t think so. Not that it really matters at this point, since the main reason I wouldn’t answer was because I didn’t think you’d take my help if I did, and that’s moot now.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Why wouldn’t we have taken your help if we’d known why you were offering it?”

“It’s not that you would necessarily have refused my aid outright, but I felt certain the debate would have slowed things down considerably at a time when we couldn’t afford a delay.”

“Are you planning on getting to the point anytime soon?” asked Melchior. “Or, should we settle in for the long haul?”

“Perhaps it’s simplest to show you.” The fox shook as though it were shedding water.

As it did so it grew and darkened, becoming a huge black wolf. The room brightened then as Tisiphone’s flames leaped higher, and I found myself sweating underneath that fiery blanket, where I had been shivering only moments before.

“I know you,” said Tisiphone. “You gave me this.” She thrust out her right arm, exposing the livid scar where the wolf who chased the moon had bitten her. “But why didn’t I recognize your smell?” she whispered.

“This is Hati?” I asked, slipping free of Tisiphone’s grasp and stepping to the right.

The wolf laughed. “Guilty as charged.”

Laginn scurried to put himself between us and the wolf, but I didn’t think it was going to make much difference.