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  "Surely. I think Góin would appreciate that," said the squirrel.

  The huge snake—which made a python look like blindworm—arched its back, lifting him. "Put your legs on either side of her body," said the squirrel. "You humans have absolutely no sense of balance."

  So Jerry knelt and then put his legs around the snake, and shimmied his way the few yards to the huge branch. He wouldn't have said no to guardrails, but compared to where he had been, the branch seemed as wide as a six-lane highway. And even if it meant certain death, he wasn't going to endure that thing around his neck one instant longer. He slipped the noose free, and stood with it in his hand.

  "Slip it down the front of your shirt and tie it around your waist," said the squirrel. "That's what Odin did. Not with the noose though. Even without a noose I think it will cut you in half after a while."

  Jerry was willing to bet that it would do a person damage a lot faster than it would cut them in half, but it had to be more pleasant—and more secure—than a noose around his neck. With painful fingers he set about unknotting the noose that had nearly killed him. There was enough rope to do as the squirrel had suggested. And actually, once he had it snugged around his waist, tight, but not going to tighten any more, it did make him feel a lot more secure. Even if he did fall, the worst that could happen was a three-yard swing—on a rope that he'd proved could hold him.

  There was a knot, he noticed now, just above his head. That was how come he'd managed to hold so long. Doubtless it was there for just that reason—to prolong the agony, and let the victim cling to life for a few extra minutes. Jerry stood there absorbing the situation for a while as the cloud broke, letting him look onto a vista of distant branches and still more distant nothingness. He took a deep breath, relishing being able to do so. "Maybe," he said to the squirrel on the branch in front of him, "you'd like to tell me who you are, and just what is going on. I owe you my life. And I gather that Loki is involved."

  The squirrel snickered. "Loki is involved in most things, especially mischief, which is why I like him. I am Ratatosk, the drill-tooth, he who carries vicious words of hate between the eagle at the top of Yggdrasil and the serpent Nídhögg in Niflheim. It's a job. And it stops them eating me, which is quite useful as both serpents and eagles like squirrel meat."

  He looked at Jerry and narrowed his eyes. "Don't get any ideas. I bite. And I have friends."

  "I wouldn't dream of it." Jerry felt the rope-abrasions on his neck. "But what exactly am I doing here?"

  "Looking stupid at the moment. By the way you've been dressed, I think you're a stand-in for Odin. I reckon that he intends some quick change of roles, and to drop your body into the void of Ginnungagap. He will emerge as having been a sacrifice to himself, stabbed with his spear, and now with the wisdom of the dead and having lifted the hidden runes."

  "Lifted?"

  "I think it is a kenning for stolen. Odin's favorite pastime besides seducing maidens. I could like him if he was less self-important. Or if he hadn't tried to catch and eat me."

  "I'm making a mental note not to do that," said Jerry. "But is there really no way out of here? I mean if I am still here after nine days, I think our one-eyed friend will just pitch me into the void anyway."

  "Beat him at his own game. Odin's a shape-shifter, if he wants to be. He'll come along in disguise just after lunch, I'd guess, and wait for some cloud to come along to toss you over the edge. Then he'll return heroically. But he's expecting a body. You could toss him over the edge instead. That would be fun."

  "And very unlikely. If I recall right he has a spear that doesn't miss. I'll have been here for nine days without food or water and my only weapon will be sore feet."

  "Gungnir the spear is a problem," admitted Ratatosk. "Oh, well. Beat him to the punch. Come walking down at dawn on the ninth day. You might even get away, pretending to be him."

  It was an attractive idea, even if it did mean spending nine days standing on a tree branch, pretending to hang. "It's not going to work," said Jerry regretfully. "I'll be too far gone with thirst, even if I manage the starvation side. I haven't got a supply of food or water." He patted his pockets . . . and felt half an apple. "Except this."

  Ratatosk chittered his teeth. "That'll help for the wound in your side anyway. And I can fetch you food and water. And even some extra clothes because it is cold here in branches with Fimbulwinter coming on. Count yourself lucky. The mist will let you sit down most of the time."

  Jerry, knowing he had eight and half more days, ate a small sliver of apple. It had a invigorating and rejuvenating effect on him. Not perhaps as much as if he'd eaten the whole thing, but enough to ease the pain of the spear stab and make the prospect of a nine day vigil with nothing but a malicious-tongued squirrel for company seem survivable. "Hey. We have to try," he said. "Maybe you can teach me these runes. I know a few."

  "Maybe. And maybe I can be off about my business," said Ratatosk. "Things to do, creatures to insult. The trouble is Nídhögg and the eagle are both lamebrains. I have to strain my intellect to add a bit of spice and malice to the messages, or they'd both have got bored years ago and eaten me. I'll strip some corpses for warm gear for you."

  It wasn't quite what Jerry would have chosen as a wardrobe, but the present owners didn't really have much use for them. And even with the hat and cloak and Skadi's slightly too large boots it was going to be very cold on this branch. Cold and a long time in which to do nothing, without any reading matter. No wonder Odin had stolen runes and talked to the hanged corpses.

  It would give him some time to do some thinking, he supposed. Thinking of just what the hell Liz had been up to in Odin's feasting-hall for starters. There was nothing formal between them . . . really. Had she perhaps slipped into the spell of this place and its role-play and beliefs? Jerry desperately wanted to believe that she had some reason for passionately kissing a Norse god with gold teeth and a big horn, besides the obvious.

  The other thing he could think about was how they could get home. That was possibly even harder to unravel, but it didn't occupy as much of his mind—proving, against all probabilities, that academics can be human too.

  "Word for you on that lover of yours from Ratatosk via Nídhögg," said Loki.

  Liz turned eagerly. Loki held up a calming hand. "He's in one piece. But reaching him, now, would be nearly impossible. He's going to try to escape at the end of the nine days. Nothing much we can do for him now. However, if your raven informant is right . . . when Odin ventures on Mirmir's well, we'll have him."

  Loki made a face. "You do realize that this means that Odin is unlikely to trade your man for any treasure? We'll have to seize him from them. It does leave us with a useful horn."

  Liz sighed. "So where is this well?"

  "It is at the root of Yggdrasil that spreads itself deep into the lands of the frost giants. We can travel there at will, whereas the place where your Jerry is now is not one that we could reach. Odin will travel with some force, but we will be there before him."

  "Just so long as Jerry doesn't find himself as the meat in the sandwich."

  "What is a sandwich?" asked Loki.

  Chapter 26

  The first night on the branch had been the worst night of Jerry's experience. The early hours were just terrifying, with only the sounds of the relentless wind and the moving branches—and things that passed in the night. Something jumped right over him, touching the rope and nearly plucking him into space.

  After that it grew quieter and colder. Even with fur over-trousers and a knitted jerkin-type thing that might have been designed for Icelandic fishermen, Jerry was cold. Long before morning he'd untied the rope and huddled into a tight little shivering ball under the blue cloak, in the middle of the branch. The cloak was fortunately a thick weave, oiled and pretty windproof, or he would have died of exposure before dawn. He even resorted to scratching the rune that he was fairly sure was Loki's name on the bark.

  Maybe that, or the wind dying down kept hi
m alive. The sky was beginning to pale when he thought of the apple in his pocket. Heaven knew he didn't feel much like eating, but it might just help.

  A tiny piece was all he could manage to bite. It might be little furry from his pocket, but it had kept very well. And it did have miraculous properties, warming him like a shot of over-proof whiskey. Warmed him enough to be standing and tied back on to his rope when he spied a couple of cold-looking warriors on the cliff-edge perhaps a hundred and thirty yards away peering at him.

  He stood still, except for the shivering—but they probably wouldn't see that from so far off. Eight more days and nights of this?

  Ratatosk arrived just after sunup. He spat out a cheekfull of nuts. He also had a tiny skin flask, perhaps a quarter of a pint, slung on a red cord over his shoulder. Maybe for a squirrel it was a feast. But oh for an extra-large jelly donut . . . make that three, and a tall coffee.

  "Brisk this morning, isn't it?" said the squirrel rubbing his paws together. "You can eat. The guards have gone back into the little hut at the end of the branch."

  "It's very generous of you," said Jerry, looking at the four nuts.

  "You're telling me," said Ratatosk. "That's part of my winter store. And in this weather all I want to do is go back to sleep in my hole. It's nice and warm and out of the wind. Cozy."

  Jerry realized that the little tree rat was doing it on purpose. "Save it for the eagle and the Nídhögg. I'm half-frozen. I don't know if I can take another night like that."

  "Soft," scoffed Ratatosk. "You'll need to toughen up because it looks like we're going to get some sleet." He held out the little flask. "This is water from Urd's well, by the way." He sniggered. "Nídhögg decided Asgard was too busy right now to worry about the Norns. He nearly got one too. They've run off to Mirmir's well. Now. I have to go off and tell the eagle that Nídhögg saw him on high, but he thought he was a runty sparrow. Want anything else?"

  A fire, shelter, and the hell out of here, thought Jerry, but what he said was, "More food and drink, I'm afraid. And maybe some more clothes. I was desperately cold last night."

  Ratatosk twitched his nose. "There is a knothole a bit further up the branch. The stags go to drink there at night. I'll see what I can do about the rest."

  Jerry realized that he'd been there a good twenty hours but had spent most of his time peering toward the cliff, or shivering under the cloak. He'd very carefully not looked down, and he also hadn't looked up or out much.

  About fifty yards farther out the great branch divided. A limb went upward and there was a V he could probably shelter in. And out on the outer branches was a great big stag, grazing. So that was what had nearly sent him over the edge last night. Yggdrasil, as he vaguely remembered, had had a good few of them. The tree looked big enough for a whole herd. Well, he'd sworn off squirrel but venison was sounding good, even raw, if not as appealing as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Of course, the fact that the stags were not small and he was unarmed, and, unlike Liz, totally inexperienced at any form of hunting, did make the chances of venison nearly as remote as the peanut-butter sandwich.

  When a squall of mixed sleet and rain came along, as Ratatosk had predicted, Jerry untied himself and retreated to the V. There was a deeper groove there than he'd realized, and it was virtually out of the wind. Though he hadn't meant to, he fell asleep. He was awakened by the squirrel tweaking his nose and shaking droplets off his damp fur onto his face. "Move. The rain is nearly over."

  So Jerry moved, sleepily, and then woke very, very suddenly when he lost his footing on the wet bark and nearly disappeared over the edge. His heart was still doing about four hundred beats to the minute when he reached the rope, tied himself on, and prepared to act dead again. He even had a chance to take a handful of sleet to suck before anyone came along the cliff edge.

  There turned out to be one fortunate aspect to the situation. The cliff, which to Jerry's non-outdoorsman eyes looked slightly higher than Everest, obviously caused a lot of updraft. That, in turn, made the tree-branch a place that was intermittently bathed in misty cloud as the air cooled and the water vapor condensed out of it. That meant he could at least sit for a while, hidden.

  He had a long day to think about the night ahead, which, in the fashion of events that you are dreading, turned out to be not as bad as he'd expected. When dusk came on he untied and headed first for the huge knothole where he had seen the stag go to drink. He had another half rotten cloak that Ratatosk had brought him, and he was determined to make the lair as comfortable as possible and sleep as much as he could before the cold really set in. He'd just organized his nest when something eclipsed both the dark tree branches and the stars. Jerry had barely time to shriek before the creature landed, and pushed him back into the V.

  "Noisy Midgarder. It's going to freeze hard tonight. I was asked to keep you warm."

  Under the huge eagle's downy belly, Jerry slept well for the first time in what felt like weeks but was probably merely days. And one of the snakes brought him a bird's egg for breakfast. He would have preferred them cooked, but he just had to switch his mind off and swallow. Pretend it was an eggnog or something.

  Only a week to go.

  That was a bit much to swallow. Harder than raw egg. Jerry found he coped better by just concentrating on getting through one day at a time.

  But he looked forward to Ratatosk's malicious gossip. He'd memorized the runes by now, and he could see the possibilities of using them with sympathetic magic. However, trying it out on flight seemed a little too brave, especially as it would require some powerful symbols like eagle primaries. He wasn't asking his duvet for that! Not after he'd seen its beak. Besides, he had a feeling that flying might be a lot more complex than it looked.

  The Krim device had very precise datums on all the sources of life energy inside the Ur-universe. Translating them into physical map-points was more complex as the Ur-universes had their own rules of physics and geography, into which logic did not always enter in the most obvious of fashions. But it was very apparent that one of the life-energy sources, one of the ones the masters had had conflict with in the past, which it had, with mechanical satisfaction seen consigned to sacrifice . . . wasn't dead yet. It seemed to have proved remarkably adept at being hanged without being dead.

  The Krim device had reached the stage of being willing to kill the life-source without a shred of the Ur-tradition—a dangerous thing.

  Unfortunately, Odin was resisting. Actually, he was giving orders. That was confusing to the machine-mind. It had been built to serve the Krim. Service was its purpose. But was this Odin becoming Krim? Willful and foolish, yes. But so were the Krim.

  Wisdom in the world of Scandinavian mythology was not something that was kept conveniently in the Library of Congress, Lamont was discovering, with his new Norse reading assistant, Jörmungand, and Ran's large collection of water-stained manuscripts.

  Or from an on-line encyclopedia.

  It had to be gleaned in some very bizarre and unpleasant places. Lamont Jackson wasn't going to shy away from that. But it did seem that Odin was the repository of a lot of it, which was more than a bit awkward, as he wasn't likely to be cooperative.

  From what Lamont could gather, Jerry was hanging out where Odin was supposed to have acquired a lot of it. Then there was Kvasir's mead of inspiration, fermented from Kvasir's blood mixed with honey, which Odin was supposed to have stolen by drilling a hole in the mountainside and seducing the giantess guard. And the water from Mirmir well, the price of which had been his eye. Wisdom appeared to be something you drank around here. Lamont had known a few folks who'd tried that method, like Emmitt's mother.

  Thor . . . The big guy was a few sandwiches short of a lunch-pack, but he was flinging heart and soul into "training" Emmitt. It might just be the making of both of them. Lamont had to smile about Liz's addendum to the way of the warrior. Her actual knowledge of Japanese culture was probably contained in two words—"sushi" and "sayonara"—and her tea ceremony was
two sugars, thanks. But she was working on Thor and the art of ikabena, as well as tisanes from elderflower, rosehip and raspberry leaf.