Stormbringer: Book 2 of the Wyrd

Seventeen

I fucking hate the ocean. Hate it. Hate hate hate. Almost as much as I fucking hate caves. I'm a thing of fire and of air, of movement and chaos and light. All this dark dank plodding bullshit makes me twitchier than a roo on a highway.

Being stuck in a cave on a boat in the ocean? Surrounded by a bunch of dvergar and the bratty sons of Thor? Not my idea of a great holiday.

I spend most of my time smoking. The cigarettes aren't real, but with one hand free I've got enough narrative trickery in me to conjure up the memory of ash and nicotine, if only for a little while.

The dvergar boat is made of metal. Magni and Móði treat this as if it's the most arcane sorcery they've ever encountered, stamping across the deck and tapping against the walls just to hear the clang. At one point, Móði teases me for my lack of interest. I'm about to sneer something sarcastic in response when it occurs to me I don't even know where to start on a couple of guys whose frame of reference is wooden boats designed to be hauled cross-country on log rollers by a few dozen burly guys. How the hell do I explain a fifteen-hundred-foot-long supertanker compared to that? Hell, forget the supertanker; how do I explain a moderately sized commercial cruise ship?

I tell it to a dvergr instead. One of Tóki's boys. The boat is stacked with them. He's understandably interested, and asks a bunch of questions about ballast and displacement and corrosion I have no answers for. Then he asks whether the mortals mount weapons on their giant floating metal whales, so I explain about ballistic missiles, and wonder—not for the first time—why the Wall-Banging Wonder Boys are bothering with something as pathetic as a hammer.

* * *

It's a long and awful journey, down there in the dark and damp and cold. Sitting on the deck with my back against a wall, I learn I do, in fact, get somewhat seasick. A great character trait in a god born from a land of seafaring traders, I assure you. But between the magic cloaks and not-quite-horses, we just didn't go on that many boat journeys. Even when Odin got it into his head to go wandering on Miðgarðr. Where our people were, there we could be. And there are ways and means for gods to travel through the Tree. We're on one now, in fact. Just not one I would've picked of my own volition.

Somewhere, out in the dark, the dim glow of a second ship bobs quietly in our wake.

* * *

Eventually, the bottom of the boat scrapes gravel. We've washed up on a bleak and rocky shore, the only illumination coming from the lapping waters of the Skærasær and the few lanterns our dvergar crew hand over as they dump us on the beach.

From here, we make our own way.

The rock is slippery and the mud clings between my toes and coats my feathers. Magni and Móði make me walk ahead, where I clip my horns painfully on stalactites hanging from the too-low ceiling. In the end, I wind up crawling over rock and though crevasses on all fours, which makes Magni sneer, but fuck him. His boots have smooth leather soles and I have built-in pitons, so whatever.

We scramble in near silence for maybe an hour before we see the light. A dim yellow glow coming from up ahead. As we get closer, I feel the realms around us shift and shimmer, and when I next stumble, I'm able to catch my fall on an iron railing, bolted to the wall.

Up ahead, I hear voices.

Everything is connected, sea to sea, earth to earth. Know the right places to fold and space itself becomes little more than complex origami, threaded on the Wyrd.

The lights get brighter. Electric lights, erected by the people who run tours in this cave. Because that's what the voices are ahead: children shrieking about bats and monsters while their parents call for hush and snap dim and blurry photos.