Stormbringer (19 page)

Em called it Operation Hearts and Minds. She hadn't given any more detail than that, just grinning a sly and dimpled grin, enthusiasm practically oozing between her teeth.

Sigmund was in trouble, and he needed their help. No surprises there, which was why they were currently standing outside of Hel's tent.

The word didn't really do it justice.
Marquee
would probably have been better, or maybe
yurt.
Wayne had never been clear on what a yurt was, exactly, but Hel's current office would've been Wayne's first guess: a sort of round, felt-covered building, mostly black, and decorated by a variety of skulls and glossy feathers that looked to have been shed by the Lady herself.

It also had two enormous Helbeasts curled around the outside, guarding.

The Helbeasts were really,
really
cool. Wayne had an entire sketchbook full of the ones she'd seen, no two of which were exactly alike. They all had horns, and feathers, and tails, and four limbs and two wings, but inside those constraints was nothing but variation. The smallest Helbeasts being the size of large dogs, the largest being, well.

The largest were the
drekar.

Em had made that connection. Wayne had asked her, not long before Munin arrived, flicking through her sketchbooks and noting similarities until she'd said, “Hey, dooder. The Helbeasts and the dragons—?”

“They're
jötunn
—
jötnar,
” Em had said, not looking up from her tablet even as she'd corrected her own noun form.

“Aaah.” Suddenly, what Sigyn had said—had used Sigmund to say—about Loki's horse boyfriend made a whole bunch of sense.

Point being: Helbeasts. Wicked cool.

The one to the left of Hel's yurt was ice-themed, with blue-gray skin and copiously fluffy long white feathers. The one on the left was sleeker, with much more of its black skin exposed beneath iridescent green plumage. Both looked up when Wayne and Em approached the Helyurt, and Wayne gave them a smile and a wave.

“Um, hey,” she said. “Can we talk with Hel for a moment?”

The white Helbeast huffed, gesturing with its head.

Like the
drekar,
the Helbeasts didn't seem to speak human-comprehensible languages. But they understood them well enough.

“Thanks!” Wayne gave both Hel's guards a little wave before stepping forward to poke her head inside the yurt's flap. “Um. Hello?”

The inside of the yurt was dark, Ásgarðr's sun blotted out by furs and black wool. The only illumination came from little lamps hanging from the ceiling, burning with some kind of eerie, blue-green magelight.

“Honored sisters, enter.”

Hel herself was sitting on a mat in the center of a pile of cushions. She'd been kneeling when Wayne looked in, head bowed and hands folded into a purposeful position, like in prayer or meditation. If Wayne had to guess, she would've said it was something magic, given the charge in the air and the taste of copper behind her tongue.

Both sensations faded as Hel's attention shifted outward. Wayne entered the yurt, Em trailing along behind, and Hel gestured to the cushions at her side.

“Come, sit. I trust things outside are to your liking?”

Hel was wicked cool, and awesome, and kind. But she also had a bit of a stiffness about her, something overly cautious and formal. Wayne was used to it, because Em gave off the same vibe sometimes. It was the aura, Wayne thought, of someone who hadn't grown up with very many friends. The shield of someone who knew they weren't always an easy person to like.

It was work, having friends like that. Wayne knew that one firsthand, particularly if Em was having one of her off weeks.

It was work, but it was worth it. Because Wayne had been popular, back in school, and had had a lot of easy friends because of it. All of whom she would've traded, in hindsight, for one single Em, and none of whom she could imagine taking to have a sit-down chat with a goddess of death in the middle of an undead horde.

Wayne's childhood friends were good people, and she still chatted to most of them on Facebook, on and off. But none of them were Em, and none of them were Sigmund.

“Everything is
so-oo-oo-oo cool
!” Wayne said, with appropriate squee and shaking. She threw herself down onto the cushions next to Hel, like they were old besties. Hel…well, it wasn't like Wayne could tell under the veil, but Hel looked like she might have blinked, hand half rising to her mouth and cute little wings unfolding like a started bird. She covered the reaction quickly, but Wayne saw it.

Then immediately pretended she hadn't, instead launching into an entirely honest babble about the things she'd seen outside, her sketchbook full of awesome, the cool people she'd met, and, like, basically
everything,
because holy shit. She was in the middle of an
undead army,
with, like, real zombies and dragons and
everything,
and for a girl whose original AIM handle had been xXSoGothBornBlackXx, back in the day, that was like
the coolest thing ever.

Em had settled down on Hel's other side, half listening to Wayne's chatter, half lost in whatever plot had brought them to Hel's tent in the first place.

Wayne had a brief flash of guilt at that, the idea they'd come only because they wanted something. Before, outside, they'd maybe kind of supposed Hel would be busy. Doing, like, whatever it was Queens of the Dead did. Inside, though, Hel looked…

Well. She looked sort of lonely.

Maybe Em sensed that, too, which is why she was letting Wayne talk. Because Em was awkward and she was abrasive, but she could be perceptive, too. Empathic. She didn't always give a shit what people were feeling, but she almost always
knew.

Em liked Hel. Wayne could tell that, as well.

Eventually, when Hel had settled—reclining back against the cushions rather than sitting up, ramrod straight—Em said:

“I admit we came here to ask a favor, not just rant enthusiastically at you until the Tree withers into dust.”

Hel's face twitched in the way Wayne—with her background in muscles and anatomy, thanks to art school—knew meant she was smiling. “This is about the raven,” she said.

“Yeah. How—?”

Hel tilted her head, apologetic. “What my people see, I see.”

“Oh,” said Em. “Right. That makes sense. Anyway, so point being we need a distraction. For Sigmund. And…look, don't take this the wrong way or anything”—never a good start to a conversation, and Wayne winced—“but did you
know
Sigmund wouldn't be allowed out of Asgard once he got in?”

Hel stiffened, just a little, and her sleeves twitched in a way that almost looked like she was drumming her fingers beneath the fabric. Finally, she said, “The
æsir
have too much pretense at honor to harm one of their own. Besides, Stepmother was always…adept at feigning innocence to her foes.”

It wasn't quite an answer, but Em nodded. “Well,” she said, “I admire your faith, but Sigmund isn't Sigyn.” It wasn't quite an admonishment.

Nor was Hel's dipped head and, “I understand,” quite an apology.

“Good. 'Cause, like, that's the reason I'm gonna need to borrow some of your people. Sigmund needs a distraction, a big one—”

“I will not go to war against the Wall. Not yet.”

“I know.” Hel's voice had been as sharp and brittle as obsidian, but Em didn't even seem to register the tone. She wasn't even looking at Hel, her eyes ignored as her mind watched something unfold inside. “War is passé, anyhow,” Em continued. “We're gonna do something better. Something big. And it'll help Sigmund, but it'll help you, too. I just need to borrow some of your guys to make it happen.”

Hel's dark tongue flicked out to run across her teeth. After a moment, she said, “What is it you require?”

So Em told her, grin a slash of bone the entire time. When she was done speaking, Wayne's brows were even higher than the pencil line, and she had to admit Em was kinda, well. She was kinda devious.

Hel agreed, teeth sharp and white beneath her veil.

“Make it so, sisters of the dead,” she said. “And let us show Ásgarðr the true power of what they stand beneath.”

The thing about the enormous, monstrous, undead army was that it couldn't win. Not in a straight-up fight. They might've outnumbered Ásgarðr's people a hundred to one, but Wayne had seen this story before—in movies and book and video games—and she knew, categorically
knew,
that no matter how many people Hel brought to the front, she'd never win an all-out war.

Because they weren't on Miðgarðr anymore, Toto, and here the mathematics didn't matter. Here, it was about the
story.
And the story was that all it took was one single guy—and it was always,
always
a guy—and a white guy to boot, Wayne hadn't failed to notice—one single guy with one single magical MacGuffin, doing one single brave, stupid thing, to bring the entire horde to its knees.

The Horde
never
won. They were the overwhelming odds, the monsters, the dark Other who had to be defeated by the superior honor and friendship and bleeding bloody hearts of the Forces of Good.

And the Horde might've had the coolest costumes and the coolest dragons on their side, but that was only so they looked much more impressive when they fell.

And fall they would, to some blond-haired, dick-swinging asshole holding a shining sword.

Em explained all this to Hel, in her usual acerbic tone, and maybe Wayne saw Hel's shoulders fall, just a little. She'd tried
so hard.
Setting up Baldr, plotting a way into Ásgarðr that wouldn't end in bloodshed, wouldn't end in the destruction of her people. But she still couldn't be The Good Guy, because she was still Wyrdborn, still trapped in her own story.

This was something Sigmund had whispered, one night over voice chat when it'd just been the three of them on the line.

“It's why Sigyn had to be mortal again,” he'd said. “Gods can't change the Wyrd, not really. But we can.”

That had been a while ago, but Em, it seemed, hadn't forgotten the lesson.

“We need to change the narrative,” she'd told Hel, inside the cozy darkness of the maybe-yurt. “And the new narrative is that this isn't an army. It's a
deconstruction.
”

Hel had tilted her head. “And this…you believe this will succeed?”

Wayne, who'd caught on already, grinned. “Hearts and minds,” she'd said, sharing a brofist with Em.

Ten minutes later, they'd walked out of the yurt wearing shiny new pendants made from Hel's own feathers. Symbols that they were doing her will and were to be obeyed by anyone loyal to Helheimr.

Once outside, Em had explained what she needed to the nearest
nár,
who'd been confused by the request, but had nonetheless gone out to spread the word.

And the game was on.

Even without cell phones, word traveled fast in a crowd full of large things that could fly. Wayne's anxiety had set in along with nighttime; she was all-too-conscious of Sigmund and of Hel and, well,
everything.
All of it riding on them and their crazy, modern-day plan.

Em kept telling her to relax, but Em's hands were shaking, too, even as her fingers flew over the screen of her tablet. Typing plots and themes and narrative. Wayne tried a few sketches, which ended mostly in erasings, and nearly snapped her pencil in half in relief when she heard someone approach, clear their throat, and say in heavily accented English, “I heard there was a gig on?”

Five guys, death-gray faces hidden beneath heavy black-and-white greasepaint. They were all carrying cases of various kinds, and were dressed in a lot of black leather and spikes.

Six years ago, the tour bus of the Norwegian black metal band Sulphur Dawn had taken a wrong turn off a mountain road, earning everyone on board—the entire band, their road crew, and all their gear—a brief and exciting tour of a cliff face, then a one-way ticket to Hel's dark realm.

Strange grave goods,
Hel had said. In this case, it meant electric guitars and drum kits and amplifiers that worked, even without a power socket to plug them into.

There were more out there, Wayne was sure of it. But Sulphur Dawn had turned up first, and they had all the kit.

Which is why Em looked up from her tablet, grinned, and asked, “Do you guys take requests?”

Far above, Munin drifted in wide, lazy circles, watching the activity down below.

The dead had cleared an area just outside the gates of Ásgarðr, wide and square, and were setting up equipment. Big black boxes Munin realized were speakers, plus a drum kit, and a bunch of guys walking around with guitars.

So Hel was hosting a rock concert? Not what Munin had been expecting, but he had to give the fat
valkyrja
points for imagination.

It was definitely her idea, too; she was the one giving the directions, telling people where to set up and where to face, and where to build the huge bonfires to ensure the band would be visible from the Wall.

The band was definitely visible from the Wall. Munin, who'd circled over Woodstock and Super Bowl halftime shows alike, knew what it was looking at. The old
einherjar
on guard duty didn't. Munin watched them point and confer among themselves, then eventually send for what turned out to be a guy in modern-looking combat fatigues. He was carrying an assault rifle, so Munin didn't dare get too close, but from the gestures, it looked like he was explaining the score to the old timers.

And then, from the stage, came the unmistakable squeal of a microphone, amps turned up to 11. Then the fat
valkyrja
's voice, living up to her name as her words echoed out across the realm.