Glad you like it, buddy. There’s no shortage of bacon here. In fact, you can have mine.
<You’re giving me prime rib with a side of bacon? I love you, Atticus. If I ever have puppies, I’m going to tell them stories about this food. It’s legendary.>
A heated exchange of Polish boiled through the screen door, and my pork chops tasted of guilt sauce. We had to chow down anyway. Any meal at this point could be our last. The waitress and the cook eventually broke it off and she exited the kitchen, no doubt to inform her customers that their breakfasts would take a bit longer.
We were just about finished when two large ravens descended with thunderous backwings that sounded like chopper blades. Each of them had a familiar white gleam in one eye. They landed on the woodpile and squawked at me.
“Hugin and Munin,” I said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” One raven—I couldn’t tell them apart—squawked and shoved his beak in my direction, then squawked again while pointing with his beak to the other raven.
“You want me to talk to that one? Hi there. Oh! I see.” It wanted me to mentally bond with the other raven. Activating my charm for magical sight, I had to blink a little bit at the intensity of white magic emanating from the two birds. But once I could focus, I found the consciousness of the indicated raven and reached out to it. Images slammed into my head, aerial views of Artemis and Diana racing across the Polish border near Dukla, each of them in a fancy new chariot pulled by four golden-horned stags. They were running side by side, following our trail across a familiar alfalfa field, when the earth gave out from under them and they fell into our pit trap. They tried to leap out of the chariots and make it back to solid ground but weren’t in time; they’d been moving quickly, and the stags pulled those floating chariots down. A grind house of gore and screaming ensued. Though I felt sorry for the stags, I didn’t feel the least bit distressed at seeing the goddesses impaled on the wooden pikes we’d left at the bottom. They’d have to heal up from that, somehow get out of the pit, and get yet another brace of chariots and new teams to pull them. They’d be going a bit slower, but they would never give up now that I had personally wounded them. I needed a long-term solution more than ever, and I didn’t have one.
The scene shifted; Artemis and Diana in the gray sky of an early dawn—it must have been the same one we experienced a few hours ago—looking none the worse for suffering what would be mortal wounds to anyone else and gathering themselves to begin again outside the pit. They had new chariots, new stags, and now a pack of seven hounds each. I remembered the hounds from mythology; they had been gifts from Pan and Faunus. Each goddess blew into a horn, and the hounds leapt ahead on our trail. They waited for a few seconds and then followed behind in their chariots. If we tried another pit trap, the hounds would fall in first and the huntresses would be able to see that in time to avoid it.
But it had worked. It had taken us about eight hours to get from the pit trap to here, and it was about three hours after dawn now, so if the huntresses began at dawn, that meant they were about five or maybe six hours behind us now.
The link broke and the raven I’d bonded with—clearly Munin, since I’d seen a memory—pointed at the other one, Hugin. Hugin’s aura was a bit more intense—the current thoughts of Odin would of course be more active than his memories. I didn’t think Hugin represented the totality of Odin’s thoughts, but it had to be a relatively huge chunk of his consciousness, or else it wouldn’t have put Odin in a coma for years when I’d speared the first Hugin back in Asgard. I had no idea how Odin thought of him, but from a Druidic perspective, Hugin was a headspace in Odin’s mind—with wings. And in a similar sense Munin was a headspace as well. Both ravens had to report back to Odin periodically to recharge and reunite all the fragments of his consciousness, but it wasn’t as if he sat with all the life of a mannequin while they were gone. Though they did embody the mind of Odin, they weren’t the full sum of it.
I connected with the bird’s bright threads of consciousness, and the aged whiskey voice of the Gray Wanderer filled my head with Old Norse.
<Keep running. You cannot ever stop for long. We are doing what we can to prevent the Svartálfar from interfering further.>
That’s very kind. But how did you hear I was in trouble?
<The Morrigan told me.>
The Morrigan is dead.
<Precisely. Nine months after we met in Oslo, she returned and gave me a ruby that was bound to her. It glowed with power. “Someday,” she told me, “this ruby will cease to glow and you will know that I am dead. And when that happens, you must protect the Druids from the dark elves if you wish them to fight with you in Ragnarok.” It did not make sense at the time—she said “Druids,” but there was only you. And I did not understand why the Svartálfar would be so important. But now it makes sense. You have enough problems without the Svartálfar on top of them.>
She foresaw this five or six years ago?
<She was a deeper one than any of us suspected.>
I let that eulogy pass unremarked. Odin, how did you find me? I’m shielded from divination.
<Your woman isn’t.>
She’s not mine. She belongs to herself.
<I care not. Run now. I want you to fight in Ragnarok. Or I want to watch the huntresses flay you alive. I find myself deliciously ambivalent.>
You’ve been watching?
<Of course. The view is quite lovely from Hlidskjálf,> he said, referring to the silver throne from which he could observe events in most of the nine realms. <I am not the only one with an interest here. And you should probably be informed: The Olympians have claimed the right to take your life. But there are gods of other pantheons who wish to keep you alive for other purposes—myself among them.>
What other gods?
Odin continued as if I hadn’t spoken. <After the Morrigan fell, these other gods informed Olympus that if you are to die, it must be accomplished through skill and not overwhelming force. They are permitted to hunt you, in other words, and if they are successful, so be it, but the Olympians may not fly here en masse to confront you.>
Who can dictate this to the Olympians?
<Humanity has created more powerful gods. The Olympians would not wish to cross them, nor would I. Zeus and Jupiter saw you building that pit trap, you know. And we saw them see it. They were going to warn the huntresses and spoil the surprise. But we stopped them. That wouldn’t have been fair. Or half so amusing.>
Thinking back to a particularly vivid dream I had twelve years ago in Flagstaff, I asked, Might one of those gods be Ganesha?
Odin ignored me again. <It works the other way too, so I caution you against using modern transport. The Olympians insisted you must escape under your own power. Should you board an aircraft or a vehicle, the Olympians will be allowed to stop you.>
So we are entertainment for the gods? We run for your sport?
<You must understand how rare this is. Your actions cannot be divined or reliably predicted. The outcome cannot be known, and thus it is exciting. And there are others interested in your demise apart from the Olympians, which makes this more interesting.>
What others?
<You have already seen them. Vampires. Dark elves. As to the latter, the Ljósálfar are coming to Midgard to keep the Svartálfar out of your way. They are anxious to fight their dark brethren on neutral ground, and, for once, they know roughly where to find them—wherever you’re headed.>