The Valhalla Prophecy by Andy McDermott
The second boat returned with the other snowmobiles fifteen minutes later. Berkeley used the time to reread his notes, occasionally glancing up toward the distant mountain. “Do you know which way we need to go?” said Nina.
“I think so,” he answered. “I’m having to work a little to put myself into their mind-set.”
“Yeah, I bet,” said Eddie. “ ‘Tough Viking warrior’ isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I look at you.”
Berkeley huffed, then continued: “But I think I’ve figured it out. We need to go northwest, up that hill.” He pointed inland. “At the top, we should see a landmark they called ‘the shield stone.’ Hopefully it’ll be obvious what it is.”
“At least we won’t have to walk,” said Nina, looking around as the soldiers waded to the returning boat to unload the snowmobiles. The hillside in question started out shallow as it rose away from the beach, but quickly became steeper. However, she was sure the vehicles could handle the climb. “What about after that?”
“From this shield stone we go along the top of a ridge, and then at the other end we have to cross through the vale of Fenrir. I still have no idea what that means, exactly—I just hope we’ll know it when we see it.” He consulted his notes again. “As long as we can find the landmarks, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble following the route. It’s not as if there are any trees to block our view.”
“There’s fog, though,” said Eddie. The wallowing clouds were still hanging over the summit, turning the mountain’s peak into a vague shadow among the endless gray, and some of the banks lower down had spread. “Looks pretty thick. We’ll need to stick close together if we go into that lot.”
“We will manage,” Kagan assured him. He turned to watch his men bringing the last pieces of cargo from the boat. “We will be ready to move out in a few minutes, once they have put together the snowmobiles. Are you all ready?”
“I’m set,” said Nina.
“Me too,” Eddie said. “Standing around on a freezing-cold beach isn’t my idea of fun. Too many flashbacks to my SAS training.”
Kagan was amused. “SAS, pah! Cold like this? This is just an ordinary day for every Russian soldier.”
“Oh God, don’t set him off,” Nina begged, seeing that her husband’s pride in his former service was about to demand satisfaction. “Once he starts ranting about how much better the SAS is than anyone else, he never shuts up.”
“Then I will not listen to him,” the Russian said with a smirk, moving to join the soldiers.
“Cheeky bugger,” Eddie grumbled. Nina laughed.
It did not take long for the snowmobiles to be assembled and loaded. The drivers took their places, then engines roared to life in unison. Each vehicle carried two people; the four Russian troopers took a pair of snowmobiles between them, Berkeley rode pillion with Kagan, while Nina straddled the last machine behind Eddie. A moment’s hesitation, then she put her arms around his waist.
She looked over his shoulder at the terrain ahead. The sight filled her with an odd sense of dread. Even though the journey would in theory be little different from the ride upriver in Sweden, the towering evergreens there had been an omnipresent reminder that life could thrive even in the cold. Here, though, there was nothing but bleak and barren rock and snow. A dead land.
Berkeley pointed up the hill. “That way!” Kagan set off, kicking up a spray of snow behind the snowmobile’s broad rubber track. The soldiers followed.
Eddie gave the case containing Thor’s Hammer, secured to the back of Kagan’s snowmobile, a dubious look. “If we find the pit and that stuff doesn’t do what it says on the tin, then what happens?”
“I don’t know,” Nina replied. “But I get the feeling Kagan’s got a contingency plan. He just hasn’t told us about it.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling too.” He opened his coat and drew his Wildey, giving it a rather theatrical check before returning it to its holster. “Good thing I brought a contingency of my own.”
“Couldn’t you have left that ridiculous thing in Valhalla?” Nina sighed, shaking her head. “Why do you need something so damn huge?”
“If you shoot something with it, it stays down,” Eddie said as he revved the engine and set off.
“Like what? A polar bear?” She meant it as a joke, but suddenly realized they were indeed in the domain of the giant Arctic predators. “Wait, you don’t think we’ll run into any polar bears, do you?” she said, nervously scanning her surroundings.
“Just being prepared,” said Eddie with a grin. He caught up with Kagan’s snowmobile, and the team began the climb toward the waiting mountain.
It took ten minutes for the expedition to reach the top of the first slope. Once there, Berkeley batted furiously on Kagan’s shoulder for him to stop. The Russian halted, the others drawing up alongside. “There, over there,” exclaimed the archaeologist, pointing.
Off to one side was a large flat boulder, tilted at a shallow angle. “The shield stone?” Nina wondered. The rock was roughly circular, and did indeed bear a resemblance to a traditional Viking shield.
“It fits the description, yeah,” Berkeley replied. He fumbled his notes from a pocket with a gloved hand and studied them, then looked around. “There should be a long ridge leading up toward the mountain.”
“That way,” said Eddie. He indicated a snow-covered rise leading higher, curling lines of wind-whipped snow gusting off its exposed top. “We’ll need to watch out, the sides are pretty steep.”
Nina tried to survey the terrain above, but the ridge faded into a gray haze of fog. “Well, we know from the Vikings’ route that there’s a valley up there somewhere. Hopefully it won’t be too—” She saw Kagan straighten in his seat, alert as a watchdog. “What?”
“Stop your engine,” the Russian told Eddie, issuing the same order in his native language to his men. The snowmobiles fell silent. “I hear something.”
There was indeed a low rumbling noise at the lower limits of hearing. Everyone looked for the source. One of the soldiers spoke in excited Russian and gestured to the south. Low-hanging clouds obscured much of the view, but the sound was clearly getting louder.
“A helicopter!” Kagan snapped. “It is Lock, it must be!” He swore in Russian.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said Berkeley, though with little conviction.
Eddie was more certain. “Who else would it be? They made Tova translate the runes, and they figured out where to go the same way we did. Arse chives! They’re going to get there before us!”
“Even if they fly directly to the pit, they will be only a few kilometers ahead of us,” Kagan insisted. “Come on! We must go.”
He set off again, Berkeley yelping and clinging on tightly with the sudden acceleration. Eddie glared in the direction of the unseen aircraft, then followed. “See? Good job I brought my gun after all,” he said over his shoulder. “And a good job they brought those.” Among the equipment on the back of the soldiers’ vehicles was a set of AK-12s: the most modern iteration of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, which despite the addition of tactical rails and polymer parts replacing wood was still instantly recognizable as a direct descendant of the venerable Soviet weapon.
“And I was worried about polar bears,” Nina moaned.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll crash in the fog,” Eddie said, before immediately shrugging in resignation. “No, I don’t think so either.”
“How long will it take us to get there?”
“No idea—we don’t even know exactly where we’re going.” He looked up at the mountain, which rose ominously above the fog bank at the higher end of the ridge. “We’ve probably got another four or five miles to go. If the weather gets worse …”
He let the worrying statement hang. Nina also chose to keep her worries to herself, instead concentrating on holding on to her husband as the snowmobiles swept past the flat rock and began their ascent.
The wind bit savagely at the riders as th
And when they got there … what were they expecting to fight at Ragnarök? The thought had been at the back of her mind for some time. Eisenhov had said in Russia that whatever was waiting inside the pit was not a real serpent, but it clearly resembled one enough for the Vikings to believe it was a great monster. They had fought it once before, when the men who had later been transformed by legend into gods, like Odin and Thor, had perished.
So what awaited them on the mountain now?
She considered asking Kagan what else he knew about the Soviet experiments, but he had pulled ahead, the narrowing ridge forcing the snowmobiles to drop into single file and space out to avoid the wakes of snow kicked up by the vehicles ahead. The crosswind picked up as they climbed. “Fuck, that’s nippy,” Eddie muttered, hunching lower over the handlebars.
“You’re not kidding,” said Nina. She felt almost as cold as in Sweden—after getting out of the river. “At least it can’t be as windy at the top, if there’s fog up there.”
Eddie looked up the ridge again. The bank of obscuring mist was slowly spilling over the lip of the flatter ground at the top, tendrils at its edge being snatched away by gusts blowing across the mountain’s face. But most of the looming gray mass remained squatting in place ahead of them, penned in by rocky slopes on each side. “Don’t like the look of that, but there isn’t a way around it. We’ll never get the snowmobiles up those cliffs.”
“We have to go through it to follow the directions on the runes,” Nina reminded him. “If we’re on the right track, that’ll be the vale of Fenrir.”
“Wolf Valley, eh? Bet you’re really glad I brought my gun now, eh?” He gave her a brief grin, then returned his attention to the task of guiding the snowmobile up the steepening ridge.
Several more minutes brought the team to the top. The landscape ahead vanished into a pale nothingness, mist shrouding everything. Kagan again signaled for everyone to halt and stop their engines. Silence descended. “I cannot hear the helicopter,” he said.
“Can’t hear anything,” said Eddie. They were now mostly sheltered from the wind by the valley’s sides. Any other sounds seemed to be swallowed by the fog.
“If they have found the pit and landed, we must catch them before they leave. Dr. Berkeley, where do the runes say we must go?”
Berkeley checked his notes again. “Through the vale of Fenrir, then there’s a rock formation they called ‘the broken finger’ pointing up the mountain. We follow that until we get to a plain they called Vigrid—‘the place of battle.’ If this pit exists, that’s where it is. Just a couple more miles.”
“Then we must move as fast as we can.” Kagan restarted his engine.
“Careful in the fog,” Eddie warned. “If you hit a boulder at fifty miles an hour, you’ll be fucked.”
“We know what we are doing,” the Russian told him tersely. He shouted orders to his men, then set off again, considerably faster on the flat than during the climb. The four soldiers followed at equally high speed.
“Fuck’s sake,” Eddie growled as he restarted his own vehicle. “If he flips his snowmobile and breaks open his jar of evil crap …”
“Try not to drive through the puddle,” said Nina, cringing at the thought.
They entered the valley. The fog quickly enveloped them, first sapping all color from the other vehicles and their riders, then leaching away detail to reduce them to nothing more than silhouettes. Even these soon faded—not solely because the fog was getting thicker, but because they were pulling away. “They’re going too bloody fast,” complained Eddie as he eased back the throttle, then made a small but urgent course change to avoid a football-sized rock that materialized in his path. “See? If I’d hit that, it might have tipped us over or even ripped off the front ski.”
“You’ve still got your lightning reactions,” Nina assured him. “Although those Russian guys are probably even faster. I mean, they are about twenty years younger than you …”
“Tchah!” He made a rude gesture, then looked at the snow ahead. “What the fuck are they doing?” he said as he saw the weaving skein of treaded ruts split apart into three separate tracks. “They’re spreading out. They won’t be able to see each other.”
“I can hardly see them now.” Nina squinted into the fog, experiencing an unsettling moment of disorientation as she realized it was now so dense that it had blotted out all points of reference, stranding her inside a featureless gray void. “No, wait—I can’t see them now! Damn, I thought it was London that was supposed to have all the pea-soupers?”
“Nah, London just stinks of diesel,” said Eddie. He peered ahead, but the other snowmobiles were completely lost to sight, even the rasp of their engines muted. Reducing speed still further, he picked one of the three diverging tracks and followed it. “Hope whoever this is has a clue where they’re going …”
They both strained to see through the surrounding nothingness. The ground became indistinct a mere twenty feet away, the blank snow making the effect even worse. Occasionally it seemed that there were dim shapes at the very fringe of visibility, but they vanished the moment they were focused upon.
Nina stiffened in her seat at a dull noise from somewhere ahead. “What was that?”
“What was what?” Eddie asked.
“I just heard—I don’t know, a bang or something.”
He brought the snowmobile to a rapid stop, trying to listen over the putter of the idling engine. “Can’t hear anything.”
“It’s gone, but … I can’t hear any of the other snowmobiles either.”
Eddie shut the machine down. Silence fell upon them like a wet cloak. “Nor can I,” he said after a moment, “but if we keep following their track, we’ll—”
A scream cut through the empty stillness.
“Okay, I heard that,” he said, restarting the engine and revving to full power.
“What the hell happened?” Nina shouted.
“They must’ve crashed. Fucking told ’em not to go too fast in this fog!”
It was not long before he slowed again. The track he was following suddenly veered sharply—but there was no sign of a rock or other obstacle. “Where’d they go?” he asked, turning to follow.
“There.” Nina pointed off to one side. A faint shape resolved itself into the overturned snowmobile as they approached. “I don’t see either of the guys on it, though.”
Eddie stopped a few yards from the other machine. “Hey!” he shouted. “Anyone hear me? Are you okay?”
There was no answer. “Maybe they don’t speak English,” said Nina, concerned.
“Oi! Vodka, free vodka!”
“Very funny.” But she was not smiling as she dismounted, and nor was her husband. “Can you see them?”
“No, but something happened here,” he replied, crouching. The snowmobile’s track revealed the spot where it had crashed and rolled over; from the sudden change in direction, the driver had obviously been trying to avoid a collision—but again there was nothing except snow in the machine’s path. “Go to the snowmobile and see if you can spot ’em. I’ll check if anyone got thrown off over here.”
Nina went to the crashed snowmobile. The engine had stalled, its cargo spilled out across the snow. There was no sign of the case containing Thor’s Hammer. “It wasn’t Kagan and Logan,” she called to Eddie before turning to check the surrounding area. At first she saw nothing—but then a shift in the drifting fog revealed a faint shape, darker than the surrounding snow and mist. She advanced a few steps, then broke into a jog as she realized it was a person. “Eddie! Over here!”
The young man lay on his side, one arm splayed out behind his back. Nina reached him—then jumped back in horror.
The Russian was dead. But he had not been killed by falling from the snowmobile. His throat had been torn open, ragged strands of flesh hanging out into a splattered pool of bright red.
Eddie reached her. “Jesus Christ!” he gasped on seeing the hideous display. “What the fuck did that to him?”
Nina had looked away—and in doing so saw something else. “Eddie, there are some tracks over here. I think the other guy crawled away.”
“He didn’t crawl,” he said, grimly examining the churned snow. “He was dragged.”
“By what?”
An answer came as a new sound reached them: a low growl.
But it was not the mechanical rasp of a snowmobile.
Nina and Eddie turned to find the source of the noise. Something appeared through the fog, advancing on them with a fearless arrogance. A wolf.
But not like any they had ever seen before.
It was huge, at least a foot taller than a normal wolf, its hunched back reaching easily to the height of Eddie’s chest. But it was monstrous in more than just size. As it drew closer, they saw that it was deformed, swollen growths bulging beneath the dense fur. One eye was almost squeezed shut by a tumor on the side of its face.
The deformities had not lessened its abilities as a hunter, though. Its mouth and fangs dripped with blood, the fur down its chest stained a deep crimson where it had ripped out the soldier’s throat.
“Oh my God,” Nina whispered. “The Vikings were right. It’s Fenrir …”
32
The wolf curled back its gore-stained lips and snarled, advancing on the couple. “Get behind me,” Eddie told Nina, eyes locked on to the predator as he slowly unzipped his coat. “Don’t make any sudden moves.”
Nina cautiously sidestepped around her husband—only to turn in fear at a new sound. “Shit!” A second wolf, as large and twisted as the first, faded into view through the fog. It too was smeared with the fresh blood of its latest kill—the second Russian soldier. “Eddie, there’s another one!”
Eddie’s hand closed around his Wildey. The first wolf was about twenty feet away, padding closer with a measured, almost mechanical relentlessness. He started to draw the gun, looking away from the approaching animal to check the position of its hunting partner. It was farther away, head low as it advanced.