The blackness in me snarled.
Cy.
I sprinted for the scaffold steps, hurdling the near-headless remains of Mrs Keener. My own bullet hadn't been capable of killing her, but Heimdall's certainly had. It was a case of right time, right place, right assassin. The look on the Norns' faces immediately before he fired had said that this was how it was supposed to be. Loki's life was meant to be ended by Asgard's gatekeeper. No one else but Heimdall could close the book on the great trickster. Loki's fate was written that way.
Freya hailed me as I ran past. I gestured towards Nagelfar, and it was then that I realised I was still holding Bergelmir's knife. My hand was clamped round it, and it dawned on me that I couldn't actually let go even if I wanted to. My skin was stuck fast to the handle.
Nagelfar's fans started whirring and the ramps began to retract. Airborne dreadnought had just become refugee vessel. I leapt onto the nearest ramp as it rose and scurried up it like a rat up a drainpipe. The door ahead of me was closing, and I heard Freya shouting from the ground below, telling me to jump off, I wasn't going to make it. But I was. I fucking well was.
I reached the door. It had very nearly slid to. Elongating my body, I daggered through the narrow gap. The door clanged shut.
Nagelfar then gave a shudder and a lurch. Its entire frame shook mightily as it hoisted itself off from the permafrosted earth.
There was me aboard, its crew, and a handful of American mercenaries.
I wasn't bothered about any of them. They could live or die, I didn't give a shit.
There was only one person on that ship I cared about.
It was me and Cy now. I was going to find him and kill him, and God help any bastard who got in my way.
Seventy-Two
I headed forward to the bridge. It seemed the likeliest place to start looking.
By the time I got there I'd already run into a few of the bad guys. I couldn't recall precisely what had happened during these encounters. All I knew was that the ice knife was even bloodier than it had been before.
The bridge was a kind of gallery affair with a broad, curved windscreen overlooking Nagelfar's prow. The five-strong crew were busy arguing as I arrived. One man, clearly the captain, was demanding that a course be set for Svartalfheim. Two pilots, seated at computer-controlled flying stations, disagreed. They were in favour of attacking the people on the ground with Nagelfar's guns. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, they said. There'd never be a chance like this again.
Voices rose. The captain wasn't managing to assert his authority. The chain of command had broken down, a sure sign of a retreat turning into a shambles.
I slit the captain's throat in mid-sentence. He was so involved in the argument that he never heard me approach.
A navigator went next. By that point the two pilots had realised they were in the shit, and decided to go on the offensive with Nagelfar while they still could. Maybe they thought they could hold me to ransom by turning the ship's guns on my comrades. Maybe they thought this would deter me somehow.
When I was finished with them, I rounded on the fifth man. He was young, a subaltern or some such. Completely bricking it.
"Can you fly this thing?" I asked.
He shook his head. "N-no. I'm only a j-junior rating. You n-need two men anyway."
"So I've effectively crashed us then?"
He nodded. "Y-yes sir."
The blackness in me wasn't bothered. The blackness didn't have much interest in self-preservation. That wasn't the way it worked.
"Oops," I said.
Thwunk!
That was the sound of a punch coming out of nowhere, connecting with my skull. My head whiplashed sideways. Neck tendons cracked.
Thwunk!
A second punch, even harder than the first. The whole of my right cheek went numb, then suddenly seemed to expand like a piece of popcorn in the microwave, puffing out with pain. I said goodbye to another molar.
"Whoof!"
That was the breath being driven from my lungs by a fist ramming into my stomach with the force of a steam piston. The tooth was expelled along with it.
"Cunt."
That was Cy, looking down on me as I crawled on all fours at his feet. I was wheezing, and my head was a squall of sirens, my vision wavering as though I was underwater.
He booted me in the midriff, spinning me over onto my back. I tried to lift the knife. He stamped on my wrist, crushing it to the floor.
Alarms wailed on the bridge. Red lights whirled and flashed. The deck began tilting beneath us, and I could hear Nagelfar's engines churning asynchronously. The ship was fighting to keep itself in the air, and failing.
If Cy was at all worried that Nagelfar was going down, he didn't show it.
"I've been itching to give you a good going over," he said. "Just to prove I'm the better man."
"Jury's still out on that," I managed to mumble through swelling lips.
Cy leant down and belted me full in the nose. I felt the snap of bone breaking, an electric jolt all the way up into my sinuses.
The alarms were getting louder and more strident. The deck was tilting ever more steeply. I could just see the windscreen, and filling it was the bulk of Yggdrasil, canted at a crazy angle. Nagelfar was heading for the World Tree. A computerised voice added itself to the cacophony of warning sounds. "Collision Imminent," it intoned, loud but calm. "Collision Imminent."
Cy set about pummelling me methodically and relentlessly. In his eyes there was nothing. Only blackness. The same blackness that was in me, the berserker rage that could take you beyond reason, beyond sense, make you fight and want to fight and only ever want to fight.
Then Nagelfar gave an abrupt lurch, and all at once the deck veered to almost vertical. Cy and I started sliding. We rolled helplessly, limbs tangled. I tried to latch onto something with my free hand on the way down but couldn't. We thumped up against a bulkhead, Cy taking more than his fair share of the impact. I wasn't sure but I thought I heard, above all the ruckus, one of his ribs crack.
I still had the knife. Had no choice about that. Soon as I'd got my bearings, I stabbed down with it. Cy caught my forearm with both hands and held me off. The blade of the knife had become oddly distended, mottled. Hot blood had melted its surface and then become frozen to it, adhering in blobs and greasy swirls. As far as I could tell, though, the thing was still sharp enough to do what it was supposed to.
I drove down with all my strength, spare hand pressing on the pommel. Cy continued to resist. The knife point quivered above his mouth, which was wide open in a rictus grimace of strain. I could see all of his teeth, his tongue, even that dangly bit of flesh at the back of his throat. Nagelfar was tipping over even further, not even on its side any more but starting to turn turtle. Yggdrasil's trunk filled the windscreen.
"Collision Imminent. Collision Imminent."
"You got Backdoor killed," I growled at Cy. "It wasn't me. You. But know what? Him getting executed bought Heimdall the time he needed. If Backdoor hadn't been blood eagled first, I wouldn't be here now to stick this down your fucking gizzard."
The knife descended, slowly but surely. The tip was now framed by Cy's teeth. The blackness in his eyes began to be replaced by something else — bright terror.
"Collision Imminent."
I put a knee on his chest and dug in with it, managing to locate the fractured rib, or near enough. A noise came out of Cy's throat, a cross between a grunt and a shriek. His grip slackened, just for a split second, and I rammed the knife all the way home. I felt the soft pressure of the blade slicing meat, splitting his tongue down the middle. Then the firmer pressure of the top of the blade grinding against his palate.