The Sword of Surtur Read online

  “Then she won’t lie low. She’ll head straight for Bifrost,” Lorelei declared. Tyr could tell from the tension in her voice that she was thinking of Amora and how she’d struggled to emerge from her older sister’s shadow.

  “It’ll be better if we catch her first,” Tyr told his companions, “but if we can’t, we know where she’s going. What we have to do is be near enough to stop her but not so close that we scare her away.”

  Thirty-Six

  Watching from the rocks heaped outside the city of Asgard’s walls, Tyr and his companions kept vigil over the Himinbjörg. He wondered if Heimdall would appreciate the irony, that the guardian of the Rainbow Bridge was himself being guarded. Or at least as much as they could afford to from a half mile away.

  Tyr’s mind was tormented by the burden he bore. It would be so easy to pass a warning along, alert his father to all that had happened. But to do so would risk a response that would be certain to make Sindr go into hiding. How long could they maintain a strengthened guard over Bifrost? Worse, if she saw no chance to use the Rainbow Bridge to bring Surtur across, Sindr might seek another way to breach the barriers. Lorelei thought it might be possible, though Bifrost was the most certain route. King Geirrodur’s rock trolls had drills that could punch holes from the Realm Below into Midgard. If they harnessed Twilight, they might be able to create a tunnel to Muspelheim that Surtur could use.

  Alerting Heimdall was another course of action. The Vanir’s extraordinary senses were continually searching for any invader who threatened Asgard, peering across the Nine Worlds from his post at the end of the Rainbow Bridge. The most dire enemies of Asgard knew of Heimdall’s powers and employed powerful magic to balk his abilities. The mere fact that Sindr had been able to cross into the realm was argument enough that such spells had been woven about her. Perhaps it was the evil sorcery of Twilight itself that concealed the plot from the sight of the All-Seer. By whatever means, Heimdall was unaware that the giant had bypassed his post, just as he didn’t know three Asgardians had slipped past him to reach Muspelheim.

  No, Tyr was convinced Sindr and Twilight were hidden from Heimdall. If she saw one of them slip down to the Himinbjörg to warn him, she might change her strategy. That was something he simply couldn’t chance. Not when the life of his father and the safety of all Asgard were in the balance.

  “Another one headed towards Bifrost.” Bjorn’s remark dragged Tyr from his troubled thoughts. He peeked out from behind the rocks and watched as an Asgardian with the look of a scholar about him walked towards Heimdall’s outpost.

  “That makes four,” Lorelei commented. “Three since we climbed into these rocks to watch the gate and not a one of them who we’re looking for.”

  “As far as we know.” Bjorn tapped the edge of his axe. “I still say we should have stopped that merchant Heimdall turned away. He could have been Sindr coming along to see if it was safe.”

  Lorelei laughed at the suggestion. “Sindr wouldn’t have walked away. She’d have struck. She knows she’ll have to face Heimdall at the very least. If she found him alone, she’d make her move.” The sorceress shook her head. “If we’d moved against that merchant and Sindr was watching, it would have spoiled everything. Don’t forget, she might have the semblance of anyone. We won’t recognize her, but she’ll recognize us.”

  Something in what Lorelei said spurred an idea. Tyr stared more intently at the scholar. The man had what looked like a long roll of parchment strapped across his back. The waxen seals and tassels hanging from it made it look like a bundle of maps, but something about its dimensions troubled the Aesir. “Lorelei, in your brief study of Twilight did you learn something of the sword’s powers? We know it will change size to suit the one who carries it, but was there anything to suggest it can alter its shape as well?”

  The sorceress gave him a puzzled look. “I found nothing that would lead me to suspect such a thing, but I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t have the opportunity to probe too deeply into its secrets.”

  A grim smile formed on Tyr’s face. “Watch that man,” he told the others. “Does it seem that bundle of maps he’s carrying might be big enough to hide a sword?”

  “You think that’s Sindr?” Bjorn asked.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Tyr answered, drawing his sword. “Be ready to move if it is. Every second might count.”

  Tyr watched in tense silence as the scholar walked to the domed Himinbjörg. His fingers tightened about Tyrsfang’s grip when he saw Heimdall step out to challenge the visitor. He couldn’t hear the conversation, but he knew the sentry was asking why the man wanted to cross the Rainbow Bridge and judging if his reason was worthy.

  Without warning, it happened. One moment Heimdall and the scholar were talking, the next the man reached to his back and ripped the sword hidden inside the heavy parchment rolls free. Flame bristled about Twilight’s dark blade as it swung towards the sentry’s head!

  Heimdall thwarted the strike with his own sword, the fearsome Hofund. The two weapons crashed together in an explosion of electricity and flame. The sentry was unaccustomed to being taken by surprise, and so reacted more by reflex than thought. He used both hands to wield Hofund. Sindr only employed one to swing Twilight. The other darted to Heimdall’s chest and from her palm a wave of fire spilled across the Vanir, green flames that crackled across his armor.

  “The poison you set into her has tainted her fire!” Tyr shouted as he ran from the rocks and started towards Himinbjörg.

  “Wonderful,” Bjorn snarled. “Instead of killing the giant, you made her stronger.”

  “Perhaps you’d have preferred I let her just crush you down in that barrow,” Lorelei growled back at them.

  Tyr saw Heimdall staggered by Sindr’s flame. The green fire didn’t scorch the sentry’s beard or mar his armor, but what it did do was weaken him with pain. Had Sindr moved to strike him with Twilight in that moment she would have found him helpless. The giant, however, was already turning to a more important goal. While the semblance of an Asgardian scholar crackled and flaked away, she lunged past Heimdall and into his bastion.

  Heimdall had regained his feet when Tyr reached him. A sickly pallor was upon his face, but the Vanir was strong enough to lift Hofund. He scowled at the sounds of destruction echoing from within his home. “I’d like to know how the giant took me unaware,” he swore.

  Tyr sprinted beside him as they entered the Himinbjörg. “That’s a long story. You’ll hear it when we’ve stopped her.”

  The inside of the fortress was a shambles. It seemed anything that could be smashed had been. This wasn’t wanton destruction though. Tyr saw at once what Sindr’s objective had been. Not among the debris was the Gjallarhorn, the enchanted instrument by which Heimdall could alert every Aesir in the Nine Worlds when Asgard was under attack. The giant had taken it with her.

  Heimdall’s eyes widened with alarm when he saw the empty spot where the Gjallarhorn should be. “Then she doesn’t mean to simply escape,” he said as they rushed past the wreckage. “This is an invasion.”

  “More than that,” Tyr told him. “She means to free Surtur and loose him upon Asgard.”

  “Then she’s either mad or a fool,” Heimdall snarled as they passed through another ruined room. “Surtur will destroy everything if he’s freed… including her.”

  Something in what Heimdall said nagged at Tyr’s mind, but he dismissed it when they emerged from the Himinbjörg and stood before the Rainbow Bridge. Ahead of them was Sindr, all semblance of an Asgardian burned away. Twenty feet tall, she towered above them, the equally enormous Twilight clenched in both hands. The flames that crackled around her still had a green tinge, and Tyr thought the fires in her eyes were less robust than they had been before.

  The giant lifted the Gjallerhorn and cast it over the edge. She fixed her fiery gaze on her enemies. “The Leavings of the Wolf.” Sindr scowled at Tyr
. She laughed when she saw Lorelei and Bjorn. “And entourage. I’ve much to repay you.” The flames around her briefly turned orange before collapsing back to a sickened green. “I’ll ask my father to let me kill you so I can make sure you are a long time dying.”

  “Surrender and I promise you’ll return to Muspelheim,” Heimdall said. He brandished Hofund. “Fight and I promise you’ll find me not so easy to surprise a second time.”

  Sindr’s face split in a fanged grin. “And I promise you’ll be the first victim of Asgard’s conqueror. Grovel and I may ask Lord Surtur to kill you quickly, but of that I make no promises.”

  “This ends now!” Tyr charged toward Sindr. She swatted him aside with a flourish of Twilight, casting him back against the walls of Himinbjörg. He felt stone crack beneath his impact, and sparks flashed across his vision. The reckless attack had been meant as a distraction, but the opening he made availed Heimdall and Bjorn little. The sentry directed a ray of cosmic energy from Hofund at the giant, but Twilight drew the blast into itself, devouring it greedily. Bjorn’s axe glanced off the giant’s leg and he was forced to retreat before her lashing tail.

  “End?” Sindr chortled. “This is only the beginning! Already Twilight calls out to its master!”

  Tyr could see the hazy distortion that shimmered across Bifrost, the heat haze he’d become so familiar with while trekking across Muspelheim. Through the distortion were dark figures. For a moment they were indistinct and unmoving. It was only a matter of moments before the scene beyond the haze came into sharper clarity. When it did, Tyr recognized the figures as fire demons… and no longer motionless. The warriors of Muspelheim surged forward through the haze. A great body of them emerged onto Bifrost. Their exultant cries rang out as they charged across the span toward the Himinbjörg.

  Tyr shook his head and started towards the bridge. He’d only taken a few steps when he suddenly froze. There was another figure taking shape on the other side of the portal, behind the cohorts of fire demons. A monstrous being of gargantuan proportions, an aura of flame surrounding the horned head, the red skin cracking and splitting as geysers of fire erupted from the flesh. The face was inhuman in its fiendish malevolence, an infernal visage with a maw like the mouth of a volcano and eyes that burned with eternal hate.

  Surtur! The fire giant himself, come to lead his hordes in the destruction of Asgard!

  Thirty-Seven

  Tyr glared at Surtur, the devil prophesied to be the murderer of his father. “You’ll not enter Asgard,” he snarled. If he could get Twilight away from Sindr, He knew it would be the first step to closing the breach.

  Heimdall again crossed swords with Sindr, Hofund cracking against Twilight in a struggle of light and darkness. The cosmic energies of the Vanir’s blade rippled through Twilight, at times smothering the sword’s fire, at others having its brilliance fade when the giant’s sword absorbed its power. Back and again the two fought until at last the greed of Twilight took too much from Hofund. The moment of weakness was enough for Sindr to exploit. Exerting her strength to the full, the flames around her turning yellow, she swung the dark blade and shoved Heimdall back.

  Had the stamina been left to her, Sindr might have finished her enemy, but if the tainted flames could sear her foes, the toll they wrought upon her was worse. After the exertion that drove Heimdall back, the yellow flames shifted to pallid green and with the shift came a slackening of Sindr’s posture, as though all the strength had drained out of her. It took a moment for her to recover even a flicker of orange in the fire that billowed about her body.

  In that moment, Tyr put himself between the giant and the Vanir. Tyrsfang slashed at her, raking down along one leg and sending a stream of fiery ichor to sizzle against the edge of Asgard. Without Heimdall, they wouldn’t be able to close the breach. Whatever peril it invited against himself, he had to keep Sindr away from the Vanir. “Forgot about me already?” he jeered, trying to provoke the giant’s ire.

  Sindr scowled at him. “Your prattle will bring you a lingering death in the bellies of my hellhounds,” she snarled.

  Tyr struck at her again, twisting aside when she moved Twilight to block him. His blade instead cut across her already injured leg. “If I’ve a chance, I might tell Svafnir who helped me overcome him. I’m sure he’d like that. Dragons are very forgiving about such things.”

  From the corner of his eye, Tyr could see Heimdall and Bjorn start to flank Sindr. Before they could strike, however, the foremost of the fire demons were upon them. The Asgardians strove against the monstrous surge, trying to keep them from gaining a foothold on Asgard’s soil. Bjorn’s axe and the coruscating blade Hofund took a brutal toll on the warriors of Muspelheim. In their vicious rush to cross the bridge, the fire demons threw their own dead and wounded off the edge to clear room for those still able to fight.

  Sindr would brook no interference in her conflict with Tyr. Infuriated by his verbal barbs, she slapped fire demons aside with her tail. “This one belongs to me,” she hissed. She brought Twilight down to parry Tyrsfang as the blade darted once more at her leg. Her eyes flared with a cold rage as she looked past Tyr. “Keep your witch out of this,” she demanded.

  Tyr angled away from Sindr to see Lorelei behind him. “No magic against her unless she lets the fire demons take a hand,” he said. It wasn’t a matter of honor. Not for him. It was merely the appreciation that he couldn’t fight both the giant and the fire demons at the same time.

  “I’ve other matters to focus upon,” Lorelei told him. Tyr noted that she’d removed the collection of tongues from her bag. Whatever else she had to do to evoke the dark powers of necromancy, he didn’t want to see. In a perverse way, he was grateful when Sindr resumed her attack.

  “Few in the Nine Worlds have dared challenge me as often as you have, Odinson,” Sindr seethed.

  “Well, people get busy,” Tyr said. Sindr’s body swelled with anger, the flames changing to a vivid orange before quickly contracting into a diseased green again, constraining her growth. Tyr caught the edge of Twilight on his sword and twisted out from beneath its murderous sweep. He studied the way the green color waxed and waned in the giant’s flames. When it was dominant, she was weak. The more she exerted herself and expended her strength, the quicker and more complete the fade back into exhaustion.

  The best way to keep her exhausted was to keep provoking her. If Tyr could keep doing that, then they might have a chance of stopping Sindr and getting Twilight away from her before…

  Tyr took the chance of looking past his foe to note the portal that had taken shape on Bifrost. Fire demons continued to troop out onto the bridge, but more imposing was the infernal colossus behind them. Surtur seethed with impatience, waiting for the instant when the gate would be strong enough to allow his passage. He reached to the portal with a gigantic hand, probing it, testing to see if it would allow him to cross.

  Abruptly the air around Tyr became cold. Not the clean frostiness that numbed flesh and crackled bone, but an unnatural chill that curdled the blood and filled the mind with unease. When he blocked one of Sindr’s blows, he saw that the giant felt the sensation too. Though her body was still wreathed in flame, he could see her flesh shiver. Tyr guessed what could make even the fire giant’s daughter feel cold: necromancy.

  His suspicion became a certainty when a spectral curtain arose before the breach Sindr had opened. Tyr thought at first it was a wall of ice, then he saw the phantasmal forms that composed it struggling to manifest with ever greater distinction and independence. The spell Lorelei had invoked, however, bound the ghostly shades into a unified whole, a grotesque barrier across the gate to Muspelheim. A few fire demons tried to force their way through the wall, but these emerged as withered husks, their vitality drained away by the necromantic force.

  Behind him, Tyr could hear Lorelei conjuring the spirits, but her voice was merged with a whispering chorus. He shuddered when he thought o
f what produced that chorus.

  “You try to distract me while the witch works her spells!” Sindr’s flames flared in keeping with her anger. Tyr dodged the cleaving edge of Twilight while the fires burned orange, then darted in and cut her across the waist when they turned green again.

  “The agreement was she wouldn’t interfere in our fight,” Tyr taunted the giant. “Nothing was said about spoiling your plan.”

  No more fire demons emerged to cross into Asgard and those that already had were being driven back by Heimdall and Bjorn. Tyr was beginning to hope they could win when he noticed that if the fire demons had retreated from their side of the breach, the fire giant hadn’t. Surtur continued to probe the gate with his hand, his face growing more enraged each time he was balked. Then a wicked smile formed on his monstrous visage. Tyr saw at once why.

  Surtur drew back and clenched his hands together. Upon the bridge, beyond the gate, a dwarfish figure manifested. A minuscule image of the fire giant that copied his every motion. Tyr had heard of such fell sorcery, the dark art of translocation. Through the connection with Twilight, Surtur was casting an aspect of himself past the barriers. While his greater essence remained in Muspelheim, this fragment was being projected onto Bifrost. With each moment, the diminutive figure grew a little more, channeling the giant’s wrath into itself.

  The spectral curtain Lorelei had raised, a barrier that could shrivel fire demons, wasn’t able to injure the projected shade of their master. Bit by bit, Surtur was feeding more of himself across the gate, swelling his image with his infernal might!