Stormbringer (4 page)

I'm trying to quit. I've been trying to quit for thirtysomething years, but this time I'm really trying. For Sig's sake, because he's a nonsmoker, and for mine, because he won't make out with me if I stink of cigarettes. Motivation's ninety percent of the way, but this is the rest of it: an indulgence, every now and then. Somewhere that won't give Sigmund cancer.

In all honesty, I'm not completely sure where I am. Between Haven and West Hazel, I think, but these are the new suburbs, and I stopped paying close attention to Panda's town planning sometime circa 1980. It's a growth market out here. Mostly young families pushed to the outer reaches by rising prices in the center, by the gentrification that sees cheap flats torn down and replaced by million-dollar duplexes.

LB makes millionaires. That's what we're renowned for, being the employer of choice for any kid with a half-baked idea and a Swiss bank account already reserved in their name. Land a decent job at one of LB's subsidiaries and it's a one-way ticket to the nerderati. For a mansion in Aldershot and an elevator down to a cellar, stacked with vintage Grange.

For everyone else, it means a rising cost of living, an hour commute, and not a single free medical clinic between here and Melbourne.

Meanwhile, a bunch of millionaire twentysomethings sit around on bean bags, patting themselves on the back for synergizing crowdsourced phone apps to solve every problem faced by the young and privileged.

Welcome to the New World Order.

Somewhere beneath the streetlight's orange glow, a lone Toyota hurtles down the freeway. Fleeing from brushed chrome and glass and dreams of progress. Back toward the comfortably numb plush suburbia of home.

It's not the worst idea I've heard all night.

So I finish my cigarette (immolating the butt into ash, Sig hates it when I litter), open my wings, and let the wind carry me home.

Sigmund is still asleep when I slip back through the balcony doors and into the apartment. I watch him for a while, but his mind is still and dark, undisturbed by dreams of blood and murder. I hope it stays that way, and I kiss his shoulder lightly—he huffs, turns over into his pillow, but doesn't wake—before I make my way down the stairs and into the living room.

The apartment is two floors of clean, modern, open-plan hipster paradise. Three bedrooms up top, one and a half bathrooms, plus one big combined kitchen-dining-living area. Everything is white and beige, accented in wood and stone, with soft-close cupboards hidden in wall panels and a tiny indoor garden-slash-water-feature tucked beneath the glass-floored staircase.

It's not the sort of apartment Lain could afford. I should probably fire the assistant who bought it for going so far outside the spec, but, well. It's not like I need the kayfabe anymore, and it is a pretty nice place to live.

It also has extra-high ceilings. For someone seven feet tall and horned, that's an important feature.

I head toward the front door, pressing my hand against the adjacent wall. The façade springs away, revealing a coat cupboard hidden behind it. True to form, it's full of coats. Mostly Lain's, but a few of Sig's and at least one of Travis's, too. And, behind them all—tucked against the boots and umbrellas—is a spear.

Once upon a time, an idiot thief cut off a sleeping woman's hair. A metaphor, of some description, and far more metaphorical than the anger of said woman's husband. So, in repatriation for his crime, our idiot thief agreed to get the woman some new locks, ones made from pure gold. In order to do this, without payment, he set two groups of dwarven craftsmen in a competition against each other, to see who could produce the greatest treasure.

This is where the spear, Gungnir, comes from. It was taken by the idiot thief's adopted brother. Odin, king of the northern gods.

There were other treasures, too. Even the idiot thief got his own, after a fashion. It's called Vartari.

The leather stitches in my lips.

Vartari's still there, in my
jötunn
skin—Lain and Travis just have scars—but at least it doesn't keep my mouth shut anymore.

That's probably a metaphor, too. Of some sort.

Gungnir probably is as well. The thing is a six-foot broomstick with a foot-and-a-half-long dragon tooth tied to the top, and there is no war in all the Realms that it can't start. That used to be Odin's game, back when we were all young and stupid. He'd find two groups of mortals, getting along mostly okay, then he'd throw Gungnir over their heads. Then we'd all laugh over how petty and violent mortals were, then send in the
valkyrjur
to pick the corpses clean. That was the old days, before Odin's star began to wane and the mortals, tired of cruelty and of infighting, swapped out the blood eagle for the hammer, the war of Gungnir for the war of Mjölnir, the war of Thor against the giants. Against the Other.

Maybe mortals get the gods that they deserve.

I pick up Gungnir. I don't like touching it. Odin's stolen magic seeps out of the wood, makes it stink of pain and rotting flesh. But Odin is dead, and I'm not, and this is my legacy. Not the legacy the old bastard was hoping for, but maybe gods get the things we deserve, too.

I leave the apartment and take the elevator.

The doors open again on floor seven, revealing a young couple saying their good-byes just inside the landing. When they step into the elevator, their eyes fall on the spot where I'm standing, leaning against the mirror, spear in one hand. My wings are gone, but the rest of me is still me—horns and scars and tattoos and all—and for that one single breath, the mortals
see
it.

Then they look away and let the doors slide shut.

This is what it means to be a god, to be Wyrdborn, to be woven from the stuff of hopes and dreams and fears. I could make the kids see me. Could grab them, scream at them, shove my Wyrd down their throats until they choke.

I could, but I won't. Wyrdtouched are too much of a handful. I already have Sig and his father and his friends to deal with. I don't need to go adding random strangers to the pile as well.

Wyrdtouched mortals are dangerous, even more than gods. We're powerful, but predictable. Have well-worn rails we rattle down for all eternity. But mortals? Mortals have
imagination.
They do things, unpredictable things. And they kill their gods, always. Something about the human condition.

The couple gets off on the ground floor. Tonight, he'll dream of endless flames. Tomorrow, she'll look down to find she's spent a whole meeting doodling a pair of grinning, stitched-shut lips. Then they'll both laugh, forget, and move on. That's the way the game is played.

I step out of the elevator two floors later, down in the car park. My car is here, nestled next to Sigmund's ancient Magna. I throw Gungnir into the backseat, then hop into the front.

I really shouldn't fit. I don't in mortal cars, not with the feet and the tail. But my car, like myself, isn't mortal, and, somehow, the system works.

Then I drive out of the building.

It'll be a while before I return.

I head back into the city, slightly west of center, toward the uni. Pandemonium University—locally known as PU, pronounced as per the expression of revulsion—is a sprawling modern campus nestled on the banks of Panda's artificial lake, Lake Cameron, named for yours truly's middle name.

Just off campus, where the lake narrows back into the river it was carved from, is a bridge. Technically, the bridge has no name and is simply an extension of the road known as the Byway, the main artery that runs along Panda's length.

Locally, however, the bridge is called the Rainbow Bridge. Named after the university students, who maintain a tradition of throwing colorful powdered chalk across the blacktop, of yarnbombing the railings and spray-painting bright murals on the concrete pillars. The hippie kids started it, back in the 1960s and '70s, and for years it drove the local council nuts trying to clean up the “damage.” By the late '80s, however, public opinion on the bridge changed. A new generation of kids was still creeping out at night with their neon legwarmers and Hypercolor T-shirts, but this time they were “warring” against a council that was becoming increasingly stacked with the grown-up balding versions of the people who'd thrown the first handfuls of chalk. Thus was the Rainbow Bridge turned from antiestablishment rallying point into a quaint local tourist attraction. Forty years later, kids still sneak out to bring color to morning commuters. The only difference is now sometimes adults join them.

There's power in symbols, especially for a god. At the end of the day, a walking symbol is all we really are.

I feel the car aching to gallop as we approach the bridge. There's no one around, not tonight, and so I let it; taking my hands off the wheel and my claws off the pedals, leaning back in the seat and feeling the wind tear through my feathers and howl on my horns.

The dials on the dash begin to climb, well over the speed limit, straining clockwise into three digits. Beneath the wheels, mad splashes of chalk seem to shimmer in the moonlight, blending with paint and yarn into one long multicolored slash into the night.

Once upon a time, mortals looked up at a rainbow and imagined a bridge, spanning between the heaven and the earth. A path the gods could walk to descend into the world, one mortals could never reach.

The Byway isn't a rainbow in the conventional sense—and thousands of mortals drive and walk and cycle its length every day—but sometimes allegory is even better than reality.

Engine roaring in my ears, wind whipping through my feathers, and the pit of my stomach lurching as the car begins to rise.

Tonight, we ride the true Rainbow Bridge—the Bifröst, the Asbrú, the bridge of the gods—that winds between the branches of the great tree Yggdrasill and ends up at Ásgarðr's gates. I haven't been up here in a long time, not since well before Ragnarøkkr. Back then, the bridge was beautiful: a burning riot of color and chaos, large enough for a hundred men to walk abreast, the roar of the Rivers Körmt and Örmt churning far beneath. Nowadays, it's…less like that. Shattered by the ravages of war, treacherous and broken, blocked by pits and rubble that no mortal car could ever hope to cross.

Fortunately, my “car” is about as mortal as I am, and the higher we climb the more the rumble of its engine sounds like the galloping of hooves.

The journey doesn't take that long. It's much shorter than I remember, given the last time I was here I was walking, not driving at odometer-cracking speeds. Soon, through the leaves and past the rubble, I see the crumbling façade of a building. This is, or was, Himinbjörg, the hall of Heimdallr, supposed watchman of the gods. On paper, his job was protecting Ásgarðr from attack by its enemies. In practice, the guy was mostly rolling around on the stone, drunk out of his fucking skull.

Heimdallr never liked me much, and the feeling was mutual. By the books, we were supposed to do the double KO thing come the Ragnarøkkr. Obviously, that didn't happen, and when things were over, it was my wife's belly his sword split open, her cold, dead fingers wound in the hair of his severed head.

So I can't say seeing his hall in ruins leaves me with any great sense of regret.

Seeing the figures standing in front of it, however, does.

Ásgarðr, it seems, has sent a welcome committee. And now the show is on.

The only thing worse than waking up was staying asleep.

Sigmund's head hurt. His head hurt, and his eyes burned, and his throat tasted like sour wine and rotten foie gras. Lying in someone else's bed in someone else's house, and he was pretty sure the room was spinning. Spinning and shrieking, a klaxon saw blade that dragged between his ears until his hand, flailing outward in the darkness, found the vibrating glass brick of his phone and somehow managed to fumble the slider across to “off.”

Then silence. Utter, abject silence.

Not the murmur of the television or the hiss of the shower, not the clatter of the kitchen or the hum of Dad's electric razor. Just nothing, an empty, soulless void. Because this wasn't home, this strange, too-big bed in this strange, too-dark room. This was Lain's place, Lain's apartment. Some huge sterile nest perched atop a glass-and-steel pillar in the heart of Pandemonium, filled with too-hip furniture shipped in straight from New York, hand-chosen to present an image, a persona. The shell in a perfectly executed three-card monte of seduction, one with Sigmund at its heart.

It was a nice apartment, but it was a con. The same con as Lain himself, crafted from a CEO's money and a god's single-minded cunning.

And now it was Sigmund's, and Sigmund was alone.

“Hnnurgh!”

Sitting up was almost worse than lying down, but only just. A glass of water and a torn-off silver blister pack of Advil stared back at Sigmund from the nightstand. He returned the expression for a moment, then drank the water, leaving the pills behind.

Even with his brain trying to claw its way out via his eyeballs, it still took Sigmund until halfway to the bathroom to realize he was hungover. That was new. New and unwanted. Definitely unwanted.

He'd had a lot to drink last night. A lot. Sigmund had never really considered himself much of a drinker, and especially not a drinker of wine. It'd always tasted a bit the same before, sort of like kerosene mixed with wood chips. Last night it'd occurred to Sigmund, sometime between the third course and the fifth, that maybe he just hadn't been drinking the right sort.

In the bathroom, the reflection in the mirror was the one he'd always remembered. Brown eyes, brown skin, brown hair. Overweight, under-shaved, forgettable in every detail.

Except that somewhere, beneath the surface, lurked the soul of a long-dead goddess. Sigyn, the Victorious. Wife of Loki and reshaper of Ragnarøkkr. She was quiet this morning—hiding from the hangover, maybe—but if he closed his eyes and felt, Sigmund could find her. An ice-cold core of certainty lurking down beneath the postadolescent anxiety and mishmashed pop culture.

When he opened his eyes again, all Sigmund saw was Sigmund. So he pulled off his T-shirt and kicked off his boxers, turning on the shower and stepping in under the ludicrously oversized spray. Like standing in the middle of a hot, soapy rainstorm, the smell of sandalwood and citrus exploding out from the sort of shampoo that came from shops selling that and nothing else.

With his eyes closed in the heat, Sigmund felt his headache receding, just a little. He stood there for far too long, waiting for the water to go cold and knowing that it wouldn't. Back at home—at Dad's home—Sigmund would get twenty minutes in the shower, tops, before the spray turned to ice. At Lain's place—at Sigmund's new place—luxury was indefinite, an endless waterfall delivered at perfect temperatures and perfect pressure, all controlled by nothing so gauche as taps but rather a large touchscreen panel set into the wall just beyond the glass. Sigmund's perfect shower was already set and stored and fav'd, ready to be recalled with the touch of a single button.

Sigmund's new life. Welcome to it.

Shower, toothbrush, hairbrush, shave. Afterward, the face in the mirror looked damper and less hungover, but otherwise unchanged.

Sigmund's clothes were still heaped in haphazard piles in the walk-in, upended from plastic storage tubs and washing baskets since repurposed to carry comic books and video games. Remnants of a dozen trips back and forth, picking up Sigmund's life from one place and shifting it to another. He dug around in the piles, finding an old pair of jeans and a caffeine molecule T-shirt hidden beneath the beige slacks and button-down shirt Sigmund had worn exactly once, exactly one lifetime ago.

Last December, at his dad's behest, Sigmund had worn those clothes to the LB office Christmas party. That'd been the start of it, all the gods and all the madness. The first time Sigmund had met Lain, in his guise as Travis Hale.

The jacket Travis had been wearing that night was hanging up not two feet away. Tucked between bespoke three-piece suits and a cascade of designer scarves. Sigmund ran his hand along the fabrics, then made his way out of the bedroom, heading down the stairs and to the kitchen. A large Mondaine wall clock told Sigmund he was late for work. As he rummaged through the breadbox, it occurred to him he didn't care.

The bread was handmade, the toaster lacquered red. Sigmund found jams in the cupboard, labeled with brown paper, with strange combinations of fruit he'd never heard of. He picked something red. It wasn't strawberry, but it'd do.

The toast popped, he put it on a plate, grabbed a knife from the drawer, opened the jam, plunged the knife in and

(carved wood beneath his hands and fear curling in his heart, the smell of blood and burning, the sound of cracking tiles as, across the foyer, the gods themselves battled for the fate of all the world, slamming one another into the ground again and again and again, rage and fear and loathing, a thousand years of agony bursting forth into this one and final fight that raged on and on just beyond Sigmund's grasp but not beyond the bitter tooth of the spear he held within his hands, the spear he took and raised and plunged through Baldr's heart, through blood and bone, Sigmund's hands that were not his hands, guided by something ancient and terrible and victorious, and Baldr-who-was-not, skewered through and lunging toward Lain and)

somehow, Sigmund was on the floor. He was on the floor, and the knife was on the floor, and so was a big long smear of

(blood)

hipster jam. All across the big white tiles, all up the shiny brown vinyl-wrap kitchen cupboards.

“Sh-shit. Shit. Shit sh-shit shit…”

Two months ago, Sigmund killed a man. Now he lived in a multimillion-dollar penthouse with that man's ghost, curled up shaking and crying in a jam-smeared kitchen.

“J-Jesus. Fuck.”

Sigmund's voice echoed through the emptiness, bounced back at him in time to the ticking of a railway clock. Alone, all alone. Because Lain had to do business and Dad was elsewhere and that left just Sigmund, fending for himself like the adult that he was. Which meant cleaning up the kitchen and getting to work. Not huddled here, trembling, because the drip, drip, drip of the jam from the counter looked like—

Like—

Like something else entirely.

Slowly, Sigmund pushed himself up the wall and off the floor. Slowly.

It took him a few tries, but he got there in the end.

He got to work, too. In the end.

It wasn't a long walk from Lain's—from
their
apartment. Maybe ten minutes, across Torr Mall and Osko Park, beneath the three huge stones that loomed, ominous and ancient, in front of LB HQ.

When he'd been a kid, Sigmund used to play games around those stones, racing his dad to the base. Later, as an adult, it'd become a meeting place for Sigmund and his friends, standing around holding coffees.

Now Sigmund could barely look at the bloody things. Not without hearing the echoes of a scream behind his ears, the not-quite scent of piss and shit and rot clinging to his nostrils.

Those stones hadn't always been Lokabrenna's logo. They used to be a prison, the groove in the top worn down by Loki's withered body, the holes threaded through with the guts of his son, turned to iron and rubbing ugly raw bands across his chest and hips and ankles. Poison dripping from a snake, suspended somewhere up above, the only succor a single stone bowl, held for a thousand years by Sigyn's patient hand.

Here, now, in the present, Sigmund ducked his head and hurried into the foyer.

Not that inside was much better. The blood had been bleached out and the tiles replaced, but Sigmund could still
feel
the battle. Some burned-out malaise that clung to the back of his throat, guilt and pain and blood.

He'd killed a man. Right there, where the grout gleamed bright and new. Sigmund could feel rune-carved wood beneath his palms. The weight of it. The slight resistance as it popped through Baldr's skin and—

And people were staring. Sigmund was gulping air like a racehorse on Everest, and people were staring.

(breathe in, two, three, breathe out, two, three, breath in, two, three, breathe)

It wasn't like he hadn't walked across the foyer with Lain since the…since everything. Lain, who was a little bit Baldr and a little bit Loki, but was mostly himself, and who and who loved Sigmund with all the fire of the sun. Sigmund had killed Lain twice over and Lain thought of it as a favor, cracking jokes about his black heart and his gold heart, grinning his too-sharp grin as madness warred behind his poison eyes.

He didn't blame Sigmund for what happened. So why was Sigmund blaming himself?

(there'd been bones. ribs. the spear shuddering as it)

The elevator chimed, and Sigmund stepped out.

So this was Sigmund's life, now. Gods and blood and death. And then this, the LB IT Basement, located on the seventh floor, because of course it was. Just sunlight and the lush green of living walls. Rows of neat cubicles decorated with lines of Nintendo figurines, frozen in vignettes along the partitions. The hum of computers and the buzz of conversation, and desktop wallpapers showing square-jawed grizzled men holding oversized weapons, standing proudly in front of shrapnel and explosions.

Sigmund's cubicle was located down the end of a row, between the window and an empty desk that had, briefly, belonged to Lain. The official story was that Lain had transferred somewhere upstairs, into one of the business departments. A nice, vague fiction, designed around Sigmund and his inability to lie. “Lain” had gone upstairs, and he did do business. And if no one asked for more than that, Sigmund wouldn't have to tell them that
upstairs
meant the CEO's office, and
business
meant running the company as Travis Hale.

Lain may have been a front, but he still came down to visit.

The morning was agony.

Sigmund spent it staring at his monitor with glassy eyes, trying to think through the pounding in his head and wishing desperately he'd downed the Advil.

The work queue mocked him. The same mindless tasks he'd been doing his entire adult life, mailboxes and profiles and passwords, and for the first time ever Sigmund didn't know how to close a single one. At nine thirty-six, Divya started up a support call, too-loud, too-shrill voice using too many words to explain too few things, bouncing off the roof tiles and straight into what was left of Sigmund's fractured nerves. Headphones blocked the sound but made his skull pound, and by nine-forty-eight Sigmund's head was in his hands, bowed over his keyboard, trying not to shake or cry or scream without even knowing why.

Fuck. What was wrong with him?

He needed Lain. Things had been okay with Lain around. Because Sigmund would start to shake or blank or tear up, and suddenly Lain would be there, all bright and grinning, wanting to go get food or make out or play
Mario Kart.
And it was okay, with Lain around, because even if Sigmund could still smell the stink of melting tiles, could still feel the slick slide of Gungnir as it pierced into—

Christ. Christ, he was a mess. He was a mess, and Lain wasn't here, and it was only ten oh-four, but Sigmund couldn't do it. Couldn't sit here and give a shit about mailbox-fucking-restores when he'd crawled through the roots of the World Tree and killed a god with his own hands. And what was enduring Divya's shrieking and Boogs's coughing to someone who'd tasted the ash of Múspell on his tongue?

Sigmund was a goddess, for fuck's sake. Or at least he had been, once. So what the bloody hell was he doing having a panic attack in his fucking cubicle?

No one looked up when Sigmund stood, nor tried to stop him on the way to the elevators. At the doors, he swiped the White Card against the reader. Not his usual pass card, the one with his name and photo that got him in on the ground floor. The White Card was something else, blank and unadorned, a gift from Lain that would take Sigmund up to the CEO's suite, miles and miles above.

Sigmund made it all the way up without seeing a single soul. Not even Nicole Anne Arin, company VP and god in her own right, whose office shared the top floor. Her doors were closed when Sigmund passed, and stayed that way when he pushed against the brass LB logo on Travis's.

As befitting a CEO, Travis's office was wonderful. A huge, quiet space in front of an enormous plate-glass window, looking out over the city. Sigmund threw himself into Travis's oversized chair, spinning around to face the view and trying to get his twitching hands back under control. They wouldn't stop clenching, itching in some way. Like they wanted to gouge or choke or shake.

Sigmund let them flex, feeling something within him calm as his eyes blinked against the sunlight glinting off the lake. Or traced the distant curve of the mountains. The sun was bright, the sky was blue…and things were all right. They were. Really. All right. Travis's chair smelled like him, smelled like Lain. All woodsmoke and loam, and it wasn't Lain himself, but it was close. Close enough.

(okay…I'm okay)

Sigmund's eyes fluttered shut and he sat there, long enough to feel the stillness settle back into his life.

(shit happens, it happened…but I'm okay)