The Jekyll Legacy by Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Twenty-Nine All Hel Breaks Loose

Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?

Things alter for the worse spontaneously,
if they be not altered for the better designedly.

 — Francis Bacon (1561—1626)

 

“Phil? Are you all right?” Selene’s sweet face loomed large above him, a tiny furrow of concern between her thin red brows. ‘She must pluck them,’ he thought, incongruously, although he’d never actually seen either Rhea or Selene engaged in beauty regimens.

He blinked, suddenly nauseous at the slight movement of his head as he tried to nod, and he felt somehow partially disembodied, as if his soul had wandered off and was just now returning, settling into its familiar home a little gingerly, still floating around a bit before fully relaxing into solidity. “I’m fine,” he managed to say, “just a little surprised.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be?” Rhea answered with a trace of sarcasm. “That speech of yours made me all gooey, so those poor girls must have felt quite desolate, hearing you so movingly describe the profound joys of marriage that they’d been utterly denied.”

“Wait just a minute!” Phil complained. “You can’t possibly suggest….”

“Well, what on Earth did you expect?” Rhea asked, rather unsympathetically, he thought.

Selene looked down at him with pity, he thought. “It probably wasn’t the most auspicious time to wax poetic on the subject of marriage, Dearest, considering how many women there were in your audience who couldn’t really be described as having happy and fulfilling conjugal relations.”

“So you’re saying that this is all my fault?” he said in wounded pride, struggling to his feet, still feeling a little woozy, as if he’d taken a hard tackle and had wound up flat on his ass with some big bruiser sitting on him.

“I’m sorry, Dearest, but when we set up this system of marriages-in-name-only, I thought that we’d all agreed that it was a compromise between what we were capable of and what our sisters truly needed. You thought, and we were of the same mind, that the technicality you’d thought of, where a woman married a man who was serving time in jail and so couldn’t consummate their relationship, would offer protection to our sisters without making impossible demands on your own abilities, and certainly your own spontaneous marriage to Rhea — undertaken in desperate haste to save her life on a wonderfully intuitive ‘hunch’ — was immediately effective, even though you hadn’t then had any sexual relationship at all, nor any immediate plan to do so.”

“Yes,” he said, “but….”

…only to have Selene cut him off. “What we failed to do, and I partially blame myself in this, was to involve our sisters in our discussions to begin with, as we should have done.”

“I’m afraid she’s right, Phil,” Rhea said. “She was always much more sensible than I was, since I tended at times toward eccentric genius….”

Selene snorted, “In your dreams! More like ‘Mad Scientist’ most of the time. Mwah-ha-ha!” she cackled in her best Lon Chaney fashion and threw up her hands into the air. “It’s alive! It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Rhea glared at her sourly. “Well, even you have to admit that my plan of taking the Jekyll formula has worked out well for both of us! I, at least, have never been happier!”

Selene’s sense of dudgeon simply evaporated at that, and she leaned in to kiss her. “Of course, it has, my darling! I never said that you didn’t have flashes of pure genius.”

Phil admitted, feeling a little like a low-down dirty dog as he realized, “It’s my fault, really. We spent months back on Earth preparing for our expedition here, and never once did it occur to me to check the facts on which I’d based my theory, nor even think about the ultimate insanity of the notion that I could ‘marry’ all those women to ‘protect’ them without incurring any real obligations that a little gold couldn’t rectify. Perhaps the prison where the right-wing loonie was incarcerated had ‘conjugal visits’ on offer, so my whole premise may have been a stupid blunder, and I certainly should at least have discussed our situation with our sisters more thoroughly while we all sat at leisure on Earth, going on shopping expeditions, exploring the neighborhood, and just ‘fooling around’ for long periods of time. I checked on the validity of our marriages, but did nothing about theirs. In fact, I didn’t actually do anything to resolve the issue, and left all these women to their own devices, sink or swim, and by-the-way thanks so much for filling in as lowly foot-soldiers as we head off into mortal danger.” He made a sour face. “Feh!” he said, “I disgust even myself!”

Eir, having been quietly observing their interaction for some moments, said, “Don’t be hard on each other, Sweethearts. It’s difficult to see the consequences of all one’s actions, and impossible to control everything, because life is constantly ongoing. Do you order your heart to beat? Your lungs to take in breath? Daily life is more than enough to occupy our minds if we’re living in the moment, and as you know, my job allows me to fairly judge between missed opportunities and real failure. You all of you meant well, and did the best you could, given the information you had ready to hand, and I can help you all.”

They looked at her amazed, because they’d never actually heard her say much of anything of what was on her mind, since she seemed always focused on the present moment, which she’d just implied was truly enough. “Help us?” Selene asked her. “How?”

Rhea acknowledged her own curiosity with a raised brow, but added, “Yes, how?”

“As you know,” she said, “I choose the slain for my mother’s hall here in Vanaheim, and leave the dregs for Valhalla. How many quarrels do you suppose are going on right now, and how many people are dying?”

“Uhm… lots?” Rhea hazarded a guess.

“One thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight… seven…,” she said promptly, “and I am there for all of them.” She smiled benignly.

And the hair rose on the back of Phil’s neck as he realized just who it was he’d married. “But that means….”

“…Exactly what it means,” she said. “If our Phil here,” she said, addressing all of them, “desires to have intimate conversations with his many wives, I can simply take him with me to visit them, and then retire to leave them in private conference until their interactions are concluded to their mutual satisfaction.” She arched one perfect brow, at once perfectly compassionate and perfectly imperious.

“Well,” Phil said, suddenly decisive, “there’s no time like the present. Eir, do you know who they all are?”

She smiled in patient amusement. “Of course I do. Would you like to include those you left behind on the world Akcuanrut and the Empress Larona were born in?”

Phil blinked in surprise, then said, “Yes, I would.”

She looked over to Selene and Rhea and asked, “Is it all right with you? We’ll be back in just a few hours, I believe.”

Rhea said, “As Phil said, there’s no time like the present.”

Selene succinctly added, “The problem has existed for far too long; it’s high time that it’s taken in hand.”

“Then we’ll see you later, ladies. Please convey our love to Larona and my mother if they drop by.” She turned to Phil and said, “Shall we start off, husband?”

Taking her hand, he said, “Lead on, wife. I’m in your hands.”

They walked off toward the pavilion, where Sleipnir was calmly munching aged hay and barley from a convenient manger. “Up, Sleipnir!” she said, and the unearthly horse responded with a whinny as she vaulted to his back, then reached down to lift her husband up behind her, and with a shout, they leapt up into the sky.

This time, their flight was different than the last, because Phil felt somehow stretched and attenuated as they rose into the clear air, as if he were somehow being separated from himself, but he was still the same man, and they plunged straight into the midst of the camp, landing near a single tent, where Eir said, “She waits within.”

Phil slid down from Sleipnir’s back and approached the tent, called out “Hallo!” and waited for a response, which wasn’t long in coming.

“Phillip?” she said as she looked out from her modest tent, startled by his presence. She then looked over to where Sleipnir and Eir were waiting, but the field around them was strangely empty, though they were in the middle of a crowded camp.

“Hello,” he said. “We spoke this afternoon. I believe you introduced yourself as Bluebell.”

“I was Bluebell, but I call myself Belinda now. I didn’t like being constantly reminded of what I’d lost, everything that had been taken away from me by the evil Na-Noc.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “I’m very sorry that we couldn’t restore everyone to be exactly what they were before they were captured by the minions of the Heart of Virtue.”

She frowned and said, “Why are you here?”

“You presented me with a… demand… just this afternoon,” he said sincerely, “a request that I’ve concluded was perfectly fair and reasonable, and my other wives agree. I’ve been unpardonably callous in my treatment of you all, and I’m here to make whatever amends I can.”

“What about the other women, my sisters?” she said suspiciously.

“I plan to spend time with all of them, and there will be no further distinction made between any of my wives. You all of you carry my children, although we mostly didn’t come to our sudden relationships in the normal course of events, and so my clear duty is to love and protect you as best I can. I’m not perfect, and occasionally do stupid things, but I imagine most men do.”

“You’ve got that part right, in any case. Some of the men-at-arms have come sniffing around, but we have it on good authority that they’re all married, despite what they may claim.”

“Should I speak to the officers, do you think?”

She snorted. “Nah! It’s pretty clear that they’re mainly interested in our money, since a few of us haven’t been nearly as cagey as a woman ought to be about the value of her goods and other property.”

“Well then, you might want to keep the fact that the Empress of Myriad is your new sister-in-law quiet too, since then you’ll have social climbers after you besides the fortune hunters. Speaking of which, I wanted to let you all know that I’ve had the wizard Akcuanrut add an amendment to your marriage contracts making your dowries exactly equal to those of my other wives. That was another of my bad ideas, and I apologize for that as well, but it was wrong of me to make any invidious distinction between any of you.”

“How much have they been changed, exactly?”

“Well, as you undoubtedly know, I’m a Master Wizard of Myriad, and my gifts to my other wives have been rather generous, so I estimated it at roughly two hundred pounds of gold, plus your choice of any custom jewelry you might want to have, or anything else you might need, for that matter, since I’m obligated to provide your food and clothing, as well as other ‘creature comforts.’ Just let me know what you’d like, and I’ll either make it for you or purchase it.”

She laughed at that. “When you feel guilty, you don’t skimp on either your apologies or amends, do you?”

He laughed along with her. “Well, since it took a dozen women to remind me that I was being a putz, I have a lot to apologize for, don’t I?”

“You do,” she said smugly. “So where do we go from here? Do you screw me while the blonde Goddess waits outside? Then run off to see to the others?”

“Not at all, unless you want me to. She’s here to offer transportation to somewhere a little more private; it’s a gift she has for traveling, and we can take as long away as you like.”

“And what about the rest of my sisters, and your more privileged wives for that matter, while we’re off wandering hand-in-hand through fields of clover? Do they just sit around and wonder where the heck we’ve gone?”

“No,” he said simply. “As I understand it, Eir — that’s the ‘blonde Goddess’ waiting over there — can bring us back to the very instant we left, although I’m not sure exactly how she does this. As I said, it’s her gift, not mine.”

“And where did you plan to take me?” she asked, evidently already familiar with dating etiquette, either from Selene’s memories and skills or from talking to the two of them during their sojourn in the centaur temple.

“Well,” he said. I thought that the valley near Gefjon’s hall was very nice, and there’d be food and shelter available. The only other place I know nearby is down over the edge of the cliff, and it’s not terribly comfortable down there.

She thought about that for a few minutes before finally speaking, “The valley, I think. It was nice there; some of those little paths off through the woods seemed to wander around forever, but somehow you could never get lost. Just when you started to get tired, or thought about going back to the hall for a little bite to eat, there it would be, just around the next bend or two.”

Phil smiled at the memory. “It was awfully nice, wasn’t it?”

“I thought so.” Then she stopped and looked, really looked at him, then said, “Why are you really doing this, Phil? We all know that we’re headed into a confrontation with the things that had captured and tortured us, and that we might not survive.”

“Belinda, I believe that we have a really good chance of surviving, most of us, anyway. What we did to you all after we saved your lives was wrong, I think, and you made us all realize it. It’s like on our trip north, when we fell into military columns, because we got caught up in the ‘official’ military expedition led by Akcuanrut and D’lon-Ra, the man who was captured by the Heart and ultimately died. It took Rhea to bring this even partially to my attention, when she made us spread out a little to accommodate the natural behavior of the centaurs, and stop marching in those stupid columns.”

She narrowed her eyebrows and asked, “Then why did it take you so long to notice?”

“Because, at the time,” he said honestly, “I was mostly still just a football player, part of a team, something like all those soldiers, so I was used to following orders and simply fell in line, as most of us did. Rhea was always much more of an individualist, and so saw the foolishness of it sooner, as did Selene.”

She smirked. “Why do you suppose they saw it first, then?”

He laughed. “Because they’re like you, of course,” he said and grinned. “I think women tend to be natural anarchists, where men most often ‘toe the mark’ when someone seems to be in charge.”

“We did wonder when you’d finally realize that we’d travel faster if we were able to forage for food as we made our way to the capital of the Empire, not that it was in any way our Empire back then.”

He grinned again. “Well, as I said, women are the natural anarchists, and it takes time for dunderheads like me to learn to ‘think outside the box.’ ”

She thought about that for a while, unfamiliar with the idiom, before she agreed. “Evidently, but you’re surprisingly humble, for such a brilliant star among the powerful leaders of the Empire, a young man who’s gone from being a mere ‘football player,’ whatever that might be, to Master Wizard and Emperor of Myriad.”

“Well, to be perfectly humble,” he said, “the Empress Larona has made it perfectly clear to me who’s the real boss, in a political sense, and both Queen Gefjon and Eir seem to be real Goddesses with astonishing powers of their own, so my sense of proportion is still fully intact.”

“Poor Phil,” she said with a sympathy that seemed only slightly ironic. “With more wives than any centaur stallion before Thundercloud, there’s not a single one of them without the pure gall to make unreasonable demands.”

“Not unreasonable at all, Belinda. It’s I who acted badly in regard to you, and I owe you my love and service. You just reminded me of my plain duty. I was remiss, not you, and I apologize.” But then he grinned and said, “I had the impression, though, that at least a few of the many souls we saved weren’t terribly interested in me, at least in any physical sense. The Uttersons, for example, seemed perfectly content the way they are.”

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” she said judiciously. “Alice and Sarah, like all the rest of us, are basically themselves plus quite a lot of Selene, and Selene’s the woman who first fell in love with you. They love each other, of course, but if the subject ever came up, I don’t think they’d either one of them mind a little more intimate interaction, because we’re all at least half in love with you, no matter who or what we were before. You might think of it as chemistry, or fate.”

Phil was startled, then taken aback. “But….”

She smiled at his discomfiture. “See what you learn when you start talking to all your wives?”

“Kvænhöllr and environs was beautiful, as always, and Phil and Belinda spent several days wandering around exploring. Several times, Phil saw off in the distance, or just disappearing around the bend of a path, what he thought must be himself in the company of yet another of the many sisters of Selene, since he doubted that there were all that many men in this little corner of the world walking around in a long pink kilt. He made no effort whatsoever to catch himself up, since he had no idea what temporal paradoxes might potentially ensue, and in fact the strong sense of déjà vu he felt on seeing himself and his alternative companion almost made him nauseous, because it wasn’t at all like seeing himself in a mirror, so he left well enough alone, stopped briefly to collect himself, then turned to go in quite another direction.”

“What was that about?” Belinda asked on the first occasion, so he’d explained exactly what he’d seen.

“Oooh! How fascinating!” she’d exclaimed, and had wanted to follow, until he’d explained the uneasy feeling it had given him, whereupon she’d said, “Men can be such babies sometimes!” but then let it drop, to his relief.

All in all, he thought they’d spent a week or so in idle acquaintance when she suddenly declared, “Let’s go back! I’m missing having all my sisters around, and I feel guilty just having fun when the world is still in danger.”

“I don’t really think that’s it’s an issue,” he said. “Eir said that, however long we stopped here, we’d return in the instant that we left, and I trust her.”

She thought about that, then said, “Well, I still miss my sisters, but why don’t we stop by that stream we keep running across before we set off back. There was a lovely patch of meadow overlooking it that seemed enticing.”

“Of course, my love,” he said indulgently, and followed her lead as she set briskly off.

When Eir dropped them off at Belinda’s tent, Phil was staggered by the sudden merging of well over six hundred of his separate selves, with a week or more’s freight of memories instantaneously loaded into his brain. He almost fell, had Eir not caught him. “It sets your head spinning sometimes, until you get used to it,” she said unnecessarily.

Belinda asked, “What’s up, Phil? A lifetime of dissipation catching up to you?” She did seem interested, if not particularly sympathetic.

“Something like that,” he said. “All my separate timelines seem to have merged, which is an interesting experience in the same sense that having someone sit on your chest and drop a boulder on your skull is ‘diverting.’ ”

“Really?” she said.

“Really,” he said. “I have very clear memories of more than twelve years of married life with you and your many sister wives, which is a little disconcerting, since I’m barely nineteen years old, last I looked, and we’ve only been married for less than four months, despite my memories.”

“Oooh! Phil!” She grinned at him and cooed, “I’ve always been attracted to older men!”

Phil rolled his eyes and said, “I’m not exactly an old man, yet.”

“No, not yet,” she agreed with more than a trace of gloom, “but just wait for a bit; with this many wives, I’m afraid we’ll wear you out before too long.”

“Don’t worry about it, Sweetheart. I’m sure young Akcuanrut will have a solution, and Gefjon definitely has a handle on it, because she’s evidently the cause of his sudden loss of weight and return to youthful vigor.”

“Handle?” she said, puzzled by the idiom.

“…is well able to take care of things; that is, she has it under control.”

“Aaah!” she said, enlightened.

“Phil, Belinða, it’s time you were getting ready,” Eir suggested with a perfectly charming slight accent.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I believe that Larona and my mother await your return, not to mention Selene and Rhea, and there are… other things as well.”

Mystified, he said, “Okay, let’s go then.”

She leaned down from Sleipnir and took his hand, then lifted him bodily from the ground and up behind her as Sleipnir leapt into the air and was standing before the pavilion almost in the blink of an eye. Eir vaulted from the weird horse and lifted him down again, then they walked past the guards and through the vestiblue to where his four other wives were waiting, along with Akcuanrut and his two. “We’re here,” Eir said.

“Good, good!” Akcuanrut said. “We have reason to believe that the Dark Gods — or Surtr and the Fire Giants, it makes no particular distinction, we think — are rising, because there have been a series of killings along edge of the gulf between Múspellheimr and Miðgarðr. As you know, and as we have actually seen, the burning rainbow bridge named Bilröst spans the gulf between Múspellheimr and Miðgarðr, so it would be a natural avenue of attack, because Yggdrasil itself is so vast that launching a direct attack against either the Æsir or the Vanes would be extremely difficult, according to Eir, especially for the Fire Giants, who might well set the great tree itself alight and thus undermine the foundations of their own world.”

“But how are they crossing the gap between the worlds, if they can’t use the mighty branches of Yggdrasil?” Phil said.

“We don’t know,” the wizard admitted. “It’s possible that some some renegade group of the Dvergar have made a bridge for them, or they might have exploited a portal between their world and the world of Men.”

“That doesn’t really make sense either, except…” Phil paused, thinking, then said excitedly, “…when they opened a portal between the cavern beneath the throne room and Earth, they seem to have exploited the very portal opened by Wildflower’s TSP device, because the Lanyons and Selene wound up back in their own living room, just beneath the rift, or weakness, left by the creation of their portal when it partially collapsed. Na-noc didn’t follow them exactly, but was obviously in close proximity, so let’s assume — for the sake of a possible explanation — that they’re able to use existing portals  — remember that there was a portal just outside the door that led to the cavern itself,  — and even offset them slightly, but don’t have the knowledge or magical power to create their own from scratch.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “Did you ever find any trace of any nearby portal that they might have used to transport Loki? I meant to ask before, but was caught up in losing a day in a space-time slippage, and then dealing with multiple aftermaths.”

“I did,” the wizard said, “and got caught up in my own series of… distractions, so I didn’t actually remember to tell you when you finally appeared at our door just now. It was well over ten miles away, and bore certain resemblances to the portals created by the ancient centaurs, so I suspect, after listening to your own theory, that it’s something that they found, rather than created.”

“So,” Phil thought aloud, “if the centaurs had also discovered Miðgarðr, there could also be an unguarded ancient portal there, just as there is at least one known centaur portal on my Earth, and probably more which we simply haven’t found, which Surtr and his gang might have found and then thought that they could use it as a way to bring force to bear on Bilröst as their road to enter Ásgarðr and assault the Æsir.”

Larona interjected a pertinent question, “But why is there any special enmity between these Fire Giants and the Æsir?”

Gefjon answered for the Nine Worlds, “Both the Jötunns and the Æsir are very quarrelsome by nature, and the Jötunns in particular feel that all other beings — or at least those within the Nine Worlds — are their inferiors and natural slaves or food.”

“The first Jötunn, ” she continued, “was Ymir, and from him all the other Jötunns were born, or so they say, although women are conspicuously absent from this story.”

“Aren’t they usually?” Rhea said sourly.

Gefjon gave her a wry look, then shrugged, “One lives in the world one finds beneath one’s feet.” Then she continued her story, “The first of the Æsir was Búri, whose son was Borr, and his grandsons out of Borr were Oðin, Vili, and Vé. These three became jealous of the Giants, and decided to kill Ymir and fashion other beings out of his body, among whom were the Dvergar, or so they say, although others say that the Dvergar were born directly from the rocks.”

“Where did the Vanes come from, then?” Selene asked.

“No one really knows, except that they were created, or arrived, after the Jötunns, but before the Æsir, and that the two groups of Gods warred with each other for quite some time before hostages were exchanged and a relative peace was established between them.”

“Hostages?” Phil queried.

“It’s a rather vague term,” she explained. “Theoretically, a hostage is at the mercy of their ‘host,’ but in practice, in dealings with powerful beings, the line between ‘hostage’ and ‘custodian’ can be rather more flexible than it sounds. I, for example, was ‘given’ to Óðinn — you know him as ‘Ásagrimmr’ — as his nominal ‘wife,’ but I never let it particularly cramp my style, you might say, and maintained my residence here in Vanaheim, despite being officially part of his household. He was never one to hang around in any case, so it didn’t really matter where I was, nor whom I might be with in any given period of time.”

Before his recent experiences, Phil might have been more upset by her casual words, but he’d become a little more… flexible about the notions both of temporality and fidelity. With six hundred and forty-five wives so far, he could hardly feel upset — or at least not reasonably upset — about the fact that most of them were as much ‘involved’ with each other as they were with him, and the notion that many of them may have been involved with other people in the past was becoming more like a biographical detail than disconcerting news. Heck, he knew for a fact that quite a few of his wives had been men. None-the-less, he was discomfited enough to pry, “In everything I’ve read, which isn’t much, since our knowledge of your worlds is so sketchy back on Earth, Óðinn’s wife was named ‘Frigg,’ so I’m a little confused about that. Did he have several wives?”

“No, of course not,” she said, annoyed, “but the name ‘Frigg’ means simply ‘Beloved,’ that is, either ‘Wife,’ or ‘Lady,’ so it’s not terribly complicated. Óðinn himself had many names, some chosen deliberately to conceal his identity in his travels, but many simply reflecting his different rôles,” she said. “Don’t you do the same on Earth? As Rhea has explained to me, the names ‘Lord,’ ‘Almighty,’ ‘Father,’and ‘Jehovah’ all refer to the same entity, the chief God of the divine pantheon, as do ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Zeus,’ so you might just as well list those names as cognomens for Óðinn as well, although we usually reserve ‘Lord’ for my stupid brother Freyr. You yourself are well supplied with names and appellations, and Rhea too has used several names; why should we be any different?”

Taken slightly aback, he said, “I’m very sorry, Gefjon. I’m just trying to figure things out, and it all seems terribly complicated to me, so I’m very confused about Óðinn, because he seemed like such a vile man, at least during my own brief encounter with him.”

“Well, things usually do look tangled,” she said, “looking from the outside in, but it all seems fairly simple to me. Does the word ‘hostage’ mean nothing in your language? I was the chief Goddess of the Vanes; he was the chief God of the Æsir. It was an ‘arranged’ marriage meant to cement — or at least make slightly less unstable — a political alliance which was never by any means a love match. As far as I was concerned, the only good thing he ever did was to create quite a bit of very moving extemporaneous poetry, and he was fairly popular at gatherings because of it. That last was especially nice, in my opinion, because he’d usually run across some empty-headed chit who thought that he was amazingly clever, so he’d take her to bed instead of me. I’m just glad that I only had one child by him, Baldr, the vaunted ‘Beautiful Boy’ the Æsir fawned over and eventually slaughtered through their reckless enthusiasm for death-defying bravado. Twits and crêtins, the sorry lot of them.”

Larona interrupted, easily assuming the grim authority of the Empress of Myriad, saying, “I hate to interrupt this fascinating discussion of domestic arrangements, but I believe we were discussing the recent suggestions that the Fire Giants might be preparing to move on Ásgarðr, weren’t we?”

“Exactly!” said Akcuanrut, quite willing to change the subject as well. “Phil had suggested that there might be centaur portals there, which the Fire Giants might have used. Unfortunately, the records we’ve found don’t mention them, or at least in any recognizable way.”

“The question is, I think,” said Phil, feeling a bit hard done by, “whether our next move should be toward Asgard, to assist the Æsir in repelling any possible assault, or toward Miðgarðr, to spy out their intentions there, if any.”

Gefjon said, “It seems odd that they would move to cross Bilröst now, since they’re supposed to wait until the Fimbulvetr, which will precede their attack on the Gods, according to prophesy.”

“And this Fimbulvetr is?” Phil asked.

She answered, “The Great Winter, the Three Years Without a Summer, when life is at its ebb and the Gods are weakest.”

“Is there anything else which supposedly precedes their attack across Bilröst?”

Gefjon looked startled, then said, “I think so. There are supposed to be three great battles, but that all happens before the Fimbulvetr, and the prophesies don’t specify where they happen.”

“Haven’t you been interested at all?” Phil asked.

“It didn’t seem possible,” she said, bewildered. “There are battles going on all the time. Which ones among them might be numbered among the three significant battles?”

“I see the problem,” he responded, “but if the Giants have found their way into Miðgarðr, might these present forays be the lead-up to those significant battles? It would certainly help their cause if they had some sort of base from which they could launch their attack.” He turned to Eir. “Eir, have you talked to any of the people who were killed in these attacks?”

“I haven’t. I can feel their deaths, but when I arrive, there’s nothing left, neither body nor soul. That’s why I suspect the Fire Jötunns. The Hrímthur, the Frost Giants, can’t destroy the soul, and neither can the ordinary Giants you encountered in Jötunheimr, but no one knows what the Fire Jötunns are capable of.”

“I seem to recall,” Phil said, “that almost all human beings are killed during this overall destruction, but if the Gods are eventually victorious, when exactly are the humans killed?”

“How do you know so much about this, Phil?” Rhea couldn’t help asking.

He looked uneasy, but answered anyway, “My father, for some strange reason, is a big fan of Wagner, and made us sit through the entire Ring Cycle one summer at the Met. I read the program notes.”

The others all looked puzzled. “Fagnr?” Eir asked.

“It’s what we call an ‘opera’ — skaldic poetry accompanied by music and song — written over two hundred years before I was born by a man named Richard Wagner. It’s fairly popular in some circles, but it’s usually presented in four big chunks, spaced widely apart in time, because you’re expected to sit still during the performance, and can only get up during scheduled ‘intermissions,’ for a total of fifteen hours or so. It probably wouldn’t appeal to your people here, and it doesn’t follow the events of our real knowledge of the legends very closely at all, because Wagner had some sort of social agenda other than telling the story as handed down from the skalds.”

“But why is it strange that your father liked the… o-per-a?” Eir asked.

“Because Wagner was a notorious antisemite, that is, he hated and despised my people. His work was very popular amongst the leadership of a group called the Nazis who exterminated roughly six million of us during one period of Earth history.”

“Six million! Impossible! There can’t be that many people in a world! What would they eat?” Gefjon said dismissively.

“On our world,” he said, “there are roughly eight billion people alive right now. The Nazis systematically murdered at least thirteen million people, including Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, members of opposing political factions, disabled persons, and unknown numbers of Russians and other Slavic peoples, although at least twenty-one million Russians and Slavs died during the Nazi war on them. Including soldiers and other combatants, at least sixty million people were killed in the wars against the Nazis and their allies. You may think that these are violent worlds here on Yggdrasil, but on Earth, we do it in wholesale lots. I don’t think there’s been a time in the last hundred years when some kind of war wasn’t raging somewhere. I wish we had your system of mandatory wergelds, since the level of wanton destruction we see in our wars would likely bankrupt the perpetrators.”

“It sounds to me as if we ought to be as leery of some of your Earth people as we are of the Fire Jötunns,” Akcuanrut said.

“It’s not a bad idea. I certainly wouldn’t encourage any sort of wholesale immigration — or ready access to the portal technology invented by Wildflower — because at least some of these immigrants would be very likely to bring their old quarrels — and murderous methods of settling ‘feuds’ — along with them as hidden baggage.”

“Yes, well,” the Empress said, “right now, we’re in the Nine Worlds and faced with an existential threat to all our worlds, whether those worlds are peaceful or not. I think we can discount for now any worries about our contacts with Earth, since none of us will survive if the Fire Jötunns succeed in their purpose. We can sort out the remaining problems once the main problem is taken care of.”

“So,” Phil asked, “where do we look first?”

“Miðgarðr, I think, in hopes that our two Master Wizards may be able to find and close the portal, if any, in that world. I took the liberty of asking Akcuanrut to shut down the portal used by Loki when it was reported to me, so at least one ‘back door’ is shut to them, and this portion of the Nine Worlds made safer.”

“So we use King Alv ís’ bridge?” he asked.

“We do. I’m leery of using any portal magic where it might be observed by our enemies. Whatever they can do now, it’s not as much as we can do, so the longer we can protect our secrets the better, I think.”

“About the cooling fabric, then; I have an idea about how it might be used as a weapon. It’s currently stored in an iron casket, something like we used to contain the Heart of Virtue, and I think it would be difficult to close those tiny portals in any case, since the far end is at least a light day away, and probably more like a light year or so, out in the Oort Cloud somewhere, or the local equivalent.”

“Light year?” The Empress asked, already knowing that she wouldn’t like the answer.

“The distance that a beam of light can travel in one year. It tends to be the furthest distance reached by comets as they orbit the local solar system.”

She didn’t, as expected, but said nothing more than, “How very interesting.” She then called out to the guards stationed outside the pavilion, “Yeomen of the Guard, rouse the camp! We’re moving out!”

Of course it wasn’t as easy to do as it was to say, but three hours later, the last cart was packed and they were lined up on the edge of the cliff facing Miðgarðr and Bilröst.

“This isn’t a bad idea,” Phil commented to Rhea and Selene, who were at his side as always as they waited for the Empress to receive the report of readiness from the back of the long column of troops, centaurs and his wives, plus the baggage train at the rear, “since we’ll be in a good position to flank the Giants if we wind up supporting the Æsir.”

“That’s nice, Dear,” Selene said, “but why don’t you let us handle strategy and tactics.”

“We’re ready, Phil,” said Larona.

Phil shouted, “Forward…” and waved his left hand in the air as a visible signal as he flung the bridge off toward Miðgarðr with his left, heard the now familiar musical throb as the bridge shot off toward their destination, the multi-colored glow it carried behind it almost invisible in the sunlight, and stepped onto the bridge without the slightest hesitation.

Unlike the last time, he was prepared for the sensation of being carried along by the bridge and continued his command immediately, “…March!” as he rose up into the air and out beyond the edge of the cliff.

Ahead of them, he saw Eir and Sleipnir flying back from Miðgarðr towards them, and as she came rushing through the air, Sleipnir’s eight hooves finding purchase on the empty air, she shouted, “That will be Heimdallr’s horn you hear!”as she hurtled past and the notes of a horn followed her, pitched much higher than he would have thought, like a huntsman’s bugle, until he realized that the Doppler effect would have raised the pitch of even a tuba, traveling as fast toward the source as they were.

Looking behind him, he saw that Eir had urged Sleipnir into a rapid turn and they were quickly catching up. She shouted again, “Your landing spot is clear, but be very quiet, since the Fire Jötunns are right over the hill you’ll see before you, and this end of Bilröst is to your right.” Then she somehow persuaded Sleipnir to sidle right up to the bridge, so she could lean right over and kiss him, then Rhea and Selene as she flew through the air more precisely matching their speed and course than the US Navy Blue Angels on their very best day, then she said quietly, “I can’t take their souls, if they have any, but I can spread a little chaos and confusion through their ranks while I await your somewhat leisurely arrival.” With that, she grinned, took out a sword like a diamond needle, bright and sparkling, and nudged her unearthly mount gently with her heels, spurring him to tremendous speed again as she hurtled back where she’d come from. “Give my best love to my mother!” was the last they heard from her as she flew off into the growing dusk, her voice already stretching out from alto into tenor.

Looking ahead into the distance, their landing place seemed dark, but they could see a red glow beyond the low hills, and the corruscating rainbow of Bilröst rising above those same hills, but further off to one side.

Phil turned to address Larona. “That red glow is caused by Fire Giants. Tell everyone to be as quiet as possible until we get into some sort of order on the ground and plan our strategy. You can see Bilröst on our right.”

As the Empress turned back to pass on her instructions, Phil turned toward Selene and Rhea to say, “Out of the frying pan, eh?”

“Cheer up, Phil,” Rhea said. “We’re somewhere over the rainbow, and we’ve got the Wizard of Oz right here. What more can life bring?”

“Munchkins?” he guessed.

They smiled at him serenely. “We’re working on that too,” they said in chorus.

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved