Chapter 900: Odin, The All-Father [Bonus - ]
Chapter 900: Odin, The All-Father [Bonus Chapter]
Silas could hear it now under the echo of the howl, a crash and a thud and the clatter of falling roof tiles, and then a great booming THUD-THUD-THUD of something enormous bounding from rooftop to rooftop, and underneath all of it, a long rattling metallic clatter, like a very long chain being dragged at high speed across a great deal of stone.
’What the hell is that…?’
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
“Fenri, stop! Stop, I said! Heel, you overgrown puppy, I said heel!” a man’s voice bellowed, sounding absolutely furious and very out of breath.
A shape came hurtling over the roof of the hall beside the terrace, cleared the gap in a single huge leap and landed in the middle of the terrace in a crouch so heavy that the marble cracked beneath her.
CRACK!
She rose slowly, and kept rising.
She was enormous.
…She was taller than Thor, taller than anyone Silas had seen yet in Asgard, all long hard muscle and broad shoulders, and she was dressed like she’d just come from a gym.
She wore a black sports top, loose track shorts with a white stripe down the side and a pair of battered running shoes, and every visible inch of her was lean, scarred and built for violence.
Her hair was a wild tangled mane of midnight black that fell all the way to her waist, and out of the top of it poked a pair of large pointed black wolf’s ears, swiveling forward.
Behind her, a thick bushy black tail lashed back and forth with excitement.
Around her neck, wrists and ankles were cuffs of thin, silky, almost invisible ribbon that shimmered like spider silk in the light, and running from them was a long glittering chain that trailed away behind her over the rooftop.
’Wha… wha…?’
And at the other end of the chain, clinging on with one hand and being dragged across the roof tiles on his stomach, was a man.
He was tall and grizzled and broad, with a short grey beard and a face like an old battle-axe, and his right arm ended at the wrist in a smooth, scarred stump.
His left hand was wrapped around the chain in a white-knuckled death grip, and he came sliding off the edge of the roof and landed on the terrace behind the wolf-girl with a heavy thump and a very bad word.
The wolf-girl didn’t even notice him… she was staring at Silas instead.
Her eyes were a burning scarlet-amber, slitted like a wolf’s, and they were fixed on him with a hungry unblinking intensity that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Her nostrils flared as she breathed in deeply, and a low rumbling growl started in her chest.
“You,” she said, and her voice was rough and husky and thrumming with excitement. “You smell strong… Very strong…”
“Hello to you too,” Silas said. “Thor warned me you’d want to bite but I didn’t realize she meant immediately.”
“You smell really, really strong,” she breathed, and her tail started wagging so hard it thumped against the statue behind her. “Like storm and dark and deep water and something old, something really old under it… Who are you? Fight me… Fight me right now…”
“Fenri, no,” Thor said firmly, stepping forward. “Absolutely not. He’s my candidate! You can’t fight my candidate on his first day.”
“Big Sister brought him?” Fenri’s ears swiveled toward Thor, then straight back to Silas. “Then he’s even better! Fight me!”
“Fenrira!” the grizzled man barked from behind her, hauling himself up off the ground with his one hand. “We talked about this! We don’t fight guests… We especially don’t fight guests the moment they walk through the gate!”
“He’s not a guest, Tyr, he’s a candidate!” Fenri said, as if that settled everything. “Candidates are supposed to be tested, everybody knows that!”
“By the court! At the festival! Not by you, in the middle of the street, before he’s even said hello to your father!”
“He already said hello!” Fenri pointed out triumphantly. “To me! Just now! So that counts!”
Tyr opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked at Silas with the expression of a man who’d been losing this exact argument for several hundred years and had long ago stopped expecting to win it.
“I’m sorry,” he said wearily. “She doesn’t mean any harm. She just… really, really likes to fight.”
“I can see that,” Silas said. “She’s very clear about her hobbies…”
Fenri crouched low, every muscle in her long body coiling like a spring, her lips peeling back from long sharp canines in a wild eager grin.
“Ready or not!” she barked.
She lunged.
Tyr yanked the chain with everything he had, and Fenri barely noticed, ripping across the terrace toward Silas like a black streak with her claws out and her mouth open, Thor shouted something, Loki squealed with joy, and Brynhildr’s spear came up.
Silas raised one hand and laid his palm flat against the top of Fenri’s head, right between her ears, as she reached him.
She stopped dead.
Nobody watching could see any force in it at all.
His hand simply settled on her head, and through that single touch, Silas let her feel it.
’I better look cool while I’m here…’
He let her feel his Gold Core beating in his chest and to Fenri, It was as if the core said ’I see you and I’m stronger than you’… It was quite scary.
Fenri stood frozen in the middle of her lunge with her claws inches from his chest and her mouth still open, and her scarlet-amber eyes went very wide.
Her ears flattened slowly against her skull then, very slowly, her tail began to wag.
“Oh…” she whispered.
Silas scratched her gently behind one ear.
Fenrira, the Bloodhound of Asgard, the wild child who had broken more chains than any god in history and had to be bound with Gleipnir so she wouldn’t charge off into every war in the Sovereign Realm, let out a long utterly helpless whine.
Her knees gave out, and she folded down onto the terrace in front of him, leaned her whole head into his hand and closed her eyes.
Her tail thumped against the marble happily.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
The terrace was dead silent.
Tyr was staring at Silas with his mouth hanging open in his grey beard.
Brynhildr had lowered her spear and was frozen in her saddle.
Sigurd looked like he’d been struck by lightning and Thor was grinning from ear to ear, her fists on her hips, looking as proud as if she’d tamed Fenri herself.
“She…” Tyr’s voice came out hoarse. “She’s never… Not once, not for anyone… Not even for her father.”
He looked down at the giant wolf-girl leaning her head into a mortal’s palm with her eyes closed and her tongue hanging slightly out of her mouth, and his voice cracked.
“Who in the nine realms are you, boy?”
Before Silas could answer, Loki was there, popping up out of nowhere at his elbow with her goo-matted rainbow hair and her wickedest grin yet.
“Oh, Big Sister,” she sang, so sweetly it was terrifying. “Big Sister, Big Sister, Big Sister… He tamed Fenri. In ten seconds. In front of Brynnie, and Sigurd, and Uncle-or-Cousin-or-Brother Tyr, and half the street.”
She clasped her goo-covered hands under her chin and batted her eyelashes up at Thor.
“It took you sixty years to get her to stop biting you. The whole city’s going to be saying your candidate’s stronger than you by dinnertime. I’m going to make a song about it with dancing.”
“Good!” Thor declared, completely unbothered, and thumped Silas on the back hard enough to rattle his teeth. “That’s exactly why I picked him! Let them sing!”
Then her storm-blue eyes narrowed, and lightning crackled around her fist.
“But I’m still throwing you off this mountain for the snot, Loki.”
“You can try~”
“Lady Thor…”
The new voice cut through the terrace like a blade, and everyone turned.
A herald stood at the top of the steps leading up toward the summit, a tall, thin, solemn man in a long robe of blue and gold, holding a white staff topped with a carved raven, and behind him stood a pair of armored guards with their spears grounded.
The herald’s face was perfectly expressionless, though his eyes flickered once to the giant wolf-girl curled up blissfully at the stranger’s feet, and then away again.
He struck his staff once on the marble.
TOK!
“The All-Father has heard of his daughter’s return,” the herald announced, and his voice rang out across the terrace. “He has heard of the stranger at her side… He has heard of the stranger’s words to Sigurd son of Sigmund, and of the stranger’s answer to the Lady Loki.”
His eyes flickered to Fenri again.
“And he has heard of the Lady Fenrira’s howl.”
He lowered his staff and looked straight at Silas.
“The All-Father will see the candidate,” the herald said. “Now!”
…
The hall at the top of the mountain was called Valaskjálf, and it was big enough to swallow Blessed Land’s entire Keep without noticing.
Silas walked into it behind the herald with Thor on one side of him and an enormous wolf-girl on the other, because Fenri had flatly refused to be left behind on the terrace.
She padded along at his heels with her tail swaying and her chain trailing behind her over the floor, and every so often she leaned over and sniffed his shoulder again with deep happy concentration, as though she were trying to memorize him.
’So weird but feels good as well…’
Tyr followed a few paces behind them, holding the end of the chain in his one hand and looking like a man who’d given up on understanding anything that happened today.
Loki had vanished somewhere along the way, which Thor said was the most frightening thing she could have possibly done.
The doors were a hundred feet high, carved from a single slab of dark wood bound in gold, and they swung open in front of the herald without anyone touching them.
Inside, the hall stretched away so far that the far end of it was hazy with distance.
Its roof was held up by pillars as thick as ancient trees, each one carved from base to capital with scenes of gods and giants and monsters locked in endless battle, and its ceiling was a single vast span of beaten gold that caught the light pouring in through the high windows and threw it back down in a warm shimmering haze.
Long tables ran down both sides of the hall beneath the windows, and hundreds of people were sitting at them or standing in groups between the pillars, gods and goddesses and lords and ladies of Asgard in rich robes and polished armor, every one of them talking in low voices.
…Every one of them stopped talking the moment Silas walked in.
He felt the weight of all those eyes land on him at once.
There were hundreds of them, some were ancient, others were powerful, some were curious, some were openly hostile, and some of the presences behind them were so heavy that the gold ring around his pupils flickered to life on its own just from walking past them.
Old power sat at those tables drinking mead and watching him the way a mountain watches a man climbing it.
’So these are the gods of Asgard,’ he thought calmly, and kept walking. ’Good to know where I stand…’
He really needed to get stronger.
At the far end of the hall, at the top of a long flight of broad golden steps, stood the throne.
It was a great high seat of dark wood and gold, wide enough for two, carved with ravens and wolves, and above it, perched on the back of the throne like a pair of living gargoyles, sat two enormous black ravens with glittering intelligent eyes.
One of them turned its head to watch Silas approach, and the other let out a single low croak that echoed off the golden ceiling and sitting on the throne, with one elbow propped on the arm of it and his chin resting on his fist, was a man.
He was huge.
That was the first thing Silas noticed, and it took a moment for the rest to sink in.
Even sitting down, he was clearly taller than Thor, and broader too, a great barrel-chested bear of a man with shoulders like a mountain ridge and arms like oak branches.
His hair and his beard were long and thick and iron grey, shot through with streaks of the same gold as Thor’s, and his beard was braided in two long plaits that hung down over his chest, bound with rings of silver.
He wore a heavy fur-lined cloak of deep blue over a plain dark tunic, and resting against the side of the throne beside him was a tall spear of grey wood tipped with a blade of shimmering runic silver.
His face was weathered and creased and scarred, the face of someone who’d fought a thousand wars and laughed his way through most of them while his left eye was covered by a worn leather patch.
’So this is Odin…’