Underworlds #4: The Ice Dragon (6 page)

J
ON NARROWED HIS EYES AT
O
DIN
. “S
AY THAT AGAIN
?”

But it was all too clear what Odin meant as we joined him, Thor, and the others, carrying Baldur’s body down to the water.

“We’re going to ride Baldur’s ship to Niflheim,” I said, “because that’s where Dana is.”

The gods rested Baldur on a platform beneath the mast. Thor laid a shroud on his brother and set the fallen god’s sword and shield over it. The Valkyries
piled bread and fruit by his side and stacked firewood around the platform.

With solemn faces, the gods lowered torches to the firewood. The planks began to smoke and burn.

Jon seemed to search everyone’s face for a sign that this was some kind of joke. “Is everyone nuts? This may be the mythological world, but that’s real fire,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love sailing. But ride a burning ship? I don’t think so —”

Even though my legs barely held me up, I walked the plank onto the deck. “I’ll use the lyre to keep the flames away from us,” I said. “We’re going. Dana’s down there. Is everybody ready?”

Ready or not, Jon and Sydney joined me on deck. With a great heave, Thor and Odin and a dozen others pushed the ship away from shore.

“You helped us today,” said Odin. “May good fortune and luck be your guides!”

I would have liked a dozen extra-large gods to be our guides, but I guess when
they
went to Niflheim it was a one-way journey. As the ship floated free on the water, we quickly squirreled ourselves behind the
arched prow, where I began plucking one string of the lyre, then a second, then a third until the flames leaned away from us.

The waves drew us quickly across the Sea of Asgard toward a range of distant rocks, where there was a narrow pass to the oceans beyond.

I kept playing the lyre to slow the fire’s progress, and it was working. Even though the flames roared up in a ring around Baldur, his body was untouched. His face, visible above the shroud, appeared as friendly and alive as the first time we saw him.

And there was a reason for that.

“A little hot, isn’t it?” Baldur sat straight up, saw the flames, and screamed. “Ahhhhhh!”

Jon and Sydney screamed, too. “Ahhhhhh!”

I quickly changed the lyre’s melody, and the flames went out in a puff of gray smoke.

“What?” I gasped. “Baldur! How?”

Sydney frowned. “Maybe because it wasn’t Ragnarok, after all? So Baldur couldn’t die?”

Baldur laughed, then tugged the sprig of mistletoe from his neck, sniffed it, and tossed it overboard.
“Well, it’s a good thing you put that fire out,” he said. He noticed that we were approaching the distant rocks, and his face twisted. “Oh. I guess I know where we’re going….”

The wind picked up, and the waves began to push the ship toward the narrow opening in a range of cliffs that separated the Sea of Asgard from the wide oceans beyond.

“Hold on,” said Jon, standing at the prow. “The space between those rocks is pretty tight. I might be able to steer us between them. Only please tell me the Norse myths don’t have rocks like the Greek myths do, where they crash together and destroy all the ships going between them. Tell me.”

Sydney looked up from Dana’s book at Baldur. “Uh …”

Baldur looked from Sydney to the rocks. “Uh …”

Jon groaned. “You’re kidding me!”

The sound of clashing stone was like a thunderclap as the great black cliffs unhinged and struck each other, sending an avalanche of shattered rock into the sea. Before we could do anything to stop them, the
rocks pulled apart, and the current sucked our ship toward them.

“I’ve got it!” Baldur shouted, grabbing hold of the rudder. “Just a twist and a turn and a —”

Sydney grabbed my arm. “Look there! On the cliffs!” A thin figure dressed in black from head to foot bounded from rock to rock above us. It was clearly a man. He ducked when the waves washed up, and then made his way, ledge by ledge, to the water’s edge.

“We’ve seen a guy like that before,” said Jon. “It looks like …” His jaw fell open. “Wait a second … the stranger at the museum?”

“The thief?” said Sydney. “The stranger who’s after the lyre!”

In a flash it came back to me — the shadowy figure, skulking through the halls of the art museum the night we plotted to steal the Lyre of Orpheus.

“Hey!” I shouted up at him.

The man stopped on a ledge. He raised his right hand high. Then he raised his fingers, first four of them, then two, then three, and finally one.

“Who are you?” I called out. “What do you want?”

But the man simply repeated what he did with his fingers. Four, two, three, one.

We lost sight of him as the ship spun forward.

“Get ready to row!” said Baldur as the prow nosed between the rocks. “If I wasn’t dead before, I may be soon!” I hoped he was just kidding, but we huddled over the oars as he weaved the ship from side to side, slowing its forward motion until the rocks were as far apart as they could be. “And — row!” We plunged the oars into the water and pulled hard. The water threw us between and past the rocks with inches to spare before they crashed together with a deep
BOOM
.

“Yeah, Baldur!” whooped Jon.

But it wasn’t any better on the other side. We bobbed wildly away from Asgard on heaving seas. Over the tops of the waves, we could see plumes of black smoke rising from the distant shorelines in every direction.

“Your world?” said Baldur.

“Oh, man. It’s worse than before,” said Sydney. “So many fires.”

Suddenly, the surface of the sea exploded, and an enormous serpent raised its head.

“The Midgard Serpent!” Baldur shouted. “Another one of Loki’s ugly children! Jon, hold the rudder with me!”

The serpent, a huge thing covered with black scales and streaky red spikes, roared and slapped its tail hard, sending a giant wave toward us. Jon jumped to the back of the ship and helped Baldur steer us directly into the wave. The ship spun around and around. Somehow, we lost sight of the serpent and found ourselves sailing down a familiar coast.

I don’t know how, but the boat had brought us to Pinewood Bluffs.

“Whoa!” Jon breathed. “Look at the smoke.”

I wanted so much to stop, to see my family. But my family wasn’t there. They had gone with everyone else when the town was evacuated.

And there was no going anywhere but Niflheim. Dana was still missing.

“There’s Power Island,” said Sydney, pointing up ahead, “where we fought the Cyclopes. One of the entrances to the Norse Underworld is somewhere beneath it, remember?”

“H
OLD TIGHT TO — SOMETHING
!” I
CRIED
.

With the ship in free fall, we jumped on one another like football players in a pileup and clung to the rigging, while Baldur peered over the side. “Uh-oh —”

“What?” I said.

WHUMP!
The ship hit water hard, then rushed forward like a racing boat.

“There’s no controlling it now!” Baldur yelled. “Hold on!”

The ship roared along a white-capped river until we were thrown into another waterway, then another and another. I counted eleven rivers in all, each faster than the one before, until we were dumped into a narrow channel jammed with ice floes.

“What just happened?” asked Sydney, climbing to her feet and looking a little green.

“Whatever it was,” said Jon, wobbling next to her, “I hope it never happens again.”

The boat slowed to a crawl as the icy river narrowed even more.

“Niflheim,” said Baldur gravely. “The smell of death gives it away.”

I wasn’t sure what death smelled like, but the air was thick with the odor of something rotting, and barely breathable. Poor Dana. I so wanted to get her out of there.

The lyre in my lap was barely in one piece, but I used the time to try to restring it. I couldn’t help thinking about Orpheus’ journey to the Greek
Underworld to rescue his new wife. After everything he did, charming the beasts and even Hades himself, he couldn’t save her. It wasn’t meant to be.

I imagined how horrible he must have felt, knowing he had tried everything and still failed. We needed to do better … but the lyre in my hands was so fragile now. I remembered the mysterious man climbing the rocks and signaling to us. Could he really be the same person as at the museum? Did he want the lyre, too?

And what did he mean — four, two, three, one?

Jon tugged my sleeve. “Time’s up.”

I reattached and tightened the lyre’s last string as best I could, then looked up. We were drifting toward a long wooden pier jutting out from the riverbank. Lanterns on the pier cast a sick green light on the black water. Beyond the pier stood a bridge with a gold roof.

“The port of the dead,” said Sydney, reading from Dana’s notes.

“It is,” whispered Baldur. “And that’s the infamous Gjoll Bridge. The gold roof is made of the shields of the dead whose souls were not chosen by my sisters to
join Odin. Not many of the living have ever seen it. This is Niflheim.”

The bridge was frightening in its own way, but nothing like the immensity in the distance behind it. There was a tree whose trunk must have measured miles from side to side. It reached to a height far beyond anything I could see.

“The giant ash tree is the axis of all three worlds,” said Baldur. “Niflheim, Midgard, and Asgard.”

I tried to imagine how everything was connected to everything else. Norse mythology was one thing, but how did all the other branches of mythology fit in? It was all too much. Besides, I had plenty of other things to worry about.

As our ship mysteriously drifted to the pier, a troop of ghostly Draugs emerged from the darkness in a slow procession. They carried a portable platform — and I knew right away what it was for.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “They’re coming for you, Baldur.”

He grumbled under his breath. “To get into the castle, we must fool the keepers of the dead,” he whispered. “It seems a shame to let my funeral go to waste.
I’ll play dead. You should, too. Everyone, quietly, get under my shroud!” Baldur lay flat on the funeral platform and pulled the heavy cloth over him. Without any other option, we ducked underneath and clung to the underside of the platform. “Psst,” Baldur said. “When we get inside the castle, you three sneak off to find Dana. I’ll play dead until the Draugs get wise. Now, shhh!”

Frozen in place, we heard the grumbling of the ghostly Draug warriors walking down the pier toward the ship. They smelled bad, as usual, but there was another smell on them we all recognized — the sour stink of Fenrir. He was definitely in Niflheim.

We were carried inland to where the ground was mostly frozen swamp, black with stubbly growth. The Draugs marched silently past all kinds of wailing, which I figured must have been coming from souls of the dead. They were angry, or sad, or both.

But it was about to get worse.

The Draugs paused, set down the platform, and strode away. I lifted the shroud for a moment to peek out. We were alone.

“There,” Sydney whispered. A huge, ugly building made of mismatched iron, stone, and wood rose up on a hill in front of the giant tree.

“I bet Dana’s in there,” I said. “Her parents, too. They have to be.”

“There’s supposed to be a monster dog, Garm, guarding Niflheim’s fortress,” Baldur whispered. “I don’t sense him nearby.”

“Maybe he’s being walked by … what’s Loki’s daughter’s name?” Jon asked.

“Hela,” I said, shivering a little. “Dana told me once. It’s a name you don’t forget.”

Clang!
The chains fell and the gate squealed open. After a minute, the Draugs hauled us across the threshold.

The Draugs set us down again so they could close the gate behind them. That’s when Baldur whispered, “Now!” We slipped out from under the shroud and darted into the shadows. I wished Baldur a silent “good luck.” We would all need it.

Hela’s fortress was a city of pointed arches and tall pinnacles, stone bridges and cobbled streets. There
were narrow passageways everywhere, low-roofed houses, and plumes of smoke rising from what looked like shops, though I couldn’t imagine what they sold there. In the middle of the city stood a crazy structure made of crumbling stone and rotting wooden beams piled up to impossible heights. It was surrounded by a bad-smelling swamp of black reeds and vines.

Sydney breathed out. “If I was keeping people prisoner, which I would never do, that ugly place is where I’d put them. Dana and her parents must be in there.”

I plucked the strings of the lyre one by one. They barely made a ripple, but the magical sound rolled back the dense sludge just enough to give us a path to the gate.

Unfortunately, the creepy guard dog must have returned from his walk, because there he was. He was huge, a big black-haired monster on four legs with a head just a little smaller than an oil drum.

“Well, he’s ugly,” said Jon. “Along with everything else here.”

“According to the myths, Garm has one purpose,”
said Sydney. “He guards the Niflheim fortress. That’s all he does.”

Garm fixed us with his bright red eyes and stepped forward. We shrank back.

I pulled out the lyre again.

“Plus, he’s deaf,” she added.

I holstered the lyre and drew my sword.

Garm growled like rumbling thunder.

“I think we’re going to have to fight,” I said. “Again.”

“Maybe not,” said Jon. “Even crazy monster dogs get hungry, don’t they?” He dug into a pocket and pulled out a chunk of toasted bread. We blinked at him.

“What? I grabbed it when you put out the fire on the boat. I didn’t think Baldur would miss it.” He pulled us behind him, then tossed the bread high. This surprised Garm, and he leaped for it. We raced past him into the black hall, shutting the big door quietly behind us.

Apparently not quietly enough.

The instant we set foot on the stone floor, doors flashed open all around us, and a hundred Draug warriors rushed in.