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  Frey and Freyja had halted their chariots. They could come no closer.

  So it was up to him.

  Again.

  He always got the Æsir into messes. This one too had its roots in his deeds and laughter, he knew. And in the end they always wanted him to get them out.

  Again.

  Well, he was one of the oldest. Not the greatest, but certainly the trickiest.

  Surt stood like a tower of flame fifty feet high and as unstoppable as an inferno. The only point that was not flaming was the pyramid pendant around his vast neck. Loki knew that they could still lose here. Surt didn't really need an army.

  Loki made him burn hotter.

  Surt grew. And laughed, a sound like fire-splintering forest. "No use against me. I feed on that."

  Loki smiled. "Then try this." He drew on his frost giant kin. He drew on the cold of Fimbulwinter. He drew the fire down.

  Surt shrank visibly. He lashed out with a tongue of flame at Loki—but he might as well have beaten at a fire with a feather. Loki, at the core, was fire. He knew that briefly all those around the circle would see him as he truly was, no matter what form he took. That was unimportant now. He concentrated his will on Surt.

  Surt shrank visibly. Now he was barely twenty feet high. Loki drew breath, preparing for the final destruction of the wild flame.

  "Enough," said a voice, atonal and quite unlike that of Surt, though it seemed to issue from him. "I am Krim. Stop and I will make you powerful. I will make you the Lord of the Æsir. We should have offered the power of mastery of this Ur-universe to you rather than Odin. He has rebelled and stolen our device's powers. You can have power and mastery over all. We have the power to make you irresistible."

  Loki laughed. "I may be quite wicked, but never evil. There is a difference, even if you don't understand it. And unlike Odin, I have no desire to rule. It would bore me to tears to have to be responsible."

  "Power means that you are above responsibility," said the Krim.

  Loki shook the flames that were his head. "Power without responsibility is evil," he said. He reached out his hands and drew the cold out of Fimbulwinter, the only cold that was strong enough to balance the heat of Surt. Norse myth was a place of balances. "Die, Surt—or Krim. This world doesn't need you."

  Loki's exercise of his will drew him down too. But he had his hearth, Sigyn. Her love and that of his children. It gave him something that wildfire could never have.

  There was an abrupt purple flash, and Surt fell into a pile of ash.

  "Ah," said Odin, as the shadows of the Valkyries passed overhead. "A rescue."

  And then a lot of things happened in such close succession that it was hard to tell what happened first.

  A rock probably. A three pound rock flung by Lamont, which missed its target—Stephens—but knocked Thjalfi-Harkness off the trail and down onto the rocks below.

  Thrúd's axe did not miss. And neither did the explosive detonation of ball-lightning with it.

  Odin's eyes widened. So did the trail where Stephens had stood. All that was left of him was an ozone reek.

  * * *

  "Surt is destroyed and the Krim has fled," said the Krim device. "The wall of your fortress has been breached. Flee this world. I will take you to another Mythworld."

  Odin clutched at the pendant around his neck. "No! You will do my bidding! I am Odin, the master."

  Liz and Lamont spilled down onto the trail behind him.

  He turned Sleipnir and lowered his spear. The Einherjar were being aerially harassed by dragons. He would deal with that. He still had Gungnir and his Æsir allies. Thor's daughter wielded a power he feared, but two mortals were no barrier.

  Marie saw what was happening and screamed, "Dive!"

  Flying horses do not do that well. But she did—right over its neck. She cannoned into Odin. He was kicking his horse into a gallop when he met her coming the other way—fast. Odin was a great horseman, and Sleipnir the greatest horse, but a hundred and forty pound human missile knocked him sideways off the horse.

  If the sword in her hand had hit him he would have been a kebab.

  Instead it hit the shaft of the spear Gungnir. She lost her hold on the sword but the deadly spear lost its head.

  Marie and Odin lay sprawled against the wall, as Sleipnir thundered on, knocking Liz sideways off the trail, and Lamont into the wall.

  Jerry had, to his amazement, beaten both Sigyn and Thrúd up the trail. Odin and a gasping Marie fought.

  Odin grabbed the sword that Marie had dropped. Jerry knew that neither he nor Lamont was ever going to get there in time. So he threw what he had in his left hand.

  Jerry could no more throw a net than he could toss a caber. But this was a magical net, using the same spells that had been used to hold the trickster, Loki. Nothing could escape it. Like Sigurd's magical sword, Gram, in Marie's hands, it took will for the deed, and spread and enveloped and entangled.

  Unfortunately, the sword in Odin's hand was Gram, wrought with rune magic and all the skill of the dwarf Reginn. It could cut a shred of wool borne by the stream-flow. It could cut this net too. Not easily, but the net couldn't stop Odin's stroke from wounding Marie, even if it did stop Odin from killing her outright. And now he fought to cut his way free of the tangling mesh.

  Marie felt the pain and the blood, and saw the red brightness of the sword. Saw Lamont running closer. Heard him scream.

  Well, this bastard might have killed her—but she was dying anyway. He wasn't going to get her man too.

  She took the thorn of sleep from her pocket, and pushed it deeply into Odin's butt.

  Lamont held her to his chest, crying, as the others arrived. Liz, scratched and bruised, swung her handbag at Odin's head. Twice. He was down and staying that way. Thrúd made doubly sure. She had recovered her axe, and sat down on him.

  "Guess it's the end, honey," said Marie weakly. "I love you so much. Take care of the kids."

  "You can't die," said Lamont, as if his sheer fierce will could hold her back.

  "Hold me, love."

  And then Sigyn ran up, took one look and shouted up at the Valkyrie circling above: "Find Idun and bring her here!"

  The Valkyrie blinked in surprise. "Idun? I came to ask what you want us to do with the rest of Einherjar."

  "Idun. Now! Or I will curse you with a cold hearth for always and always."

  The Valkyrie clapped her heels to her horse, as Jerry and Liz tried to staunch the blood from Marie's wound. They were successful in that, but it didn't look as if it was going to make any difference. She was slipping away.

  And then, much sooner that they would have thought possible, the Valkyrie returned and dropped an angry Idun next to them.

  "Sister, I will not help you," said the Lady of Spring, the rejuvenator, the custodian of the apples of youth. She sounded very cross. "Loki can die, for all I care. He got me kidnapped. And then he turned me into a nut."

  Thrúd looked up from her seat on Odin before Sigyn had a chance to reply. "Idun, see who I am sitting on. And understand what this means. Thor is now Lord of the Æsir. If you don't help this woman he's not going to be just angry. We owe her more than we can repay."

  "It's not for Loki?" asked Idun, startled.

  "Loki has won on the plain," said Sigyn. "Ragnarok will not come. Look—already Fimbulwinter is past and the sun is shining. Your spring comes. Anyway, the flame does not ever need your apples. This woman does."

  "She helped Thor to beat his drinking problem," said Thrúd. "And we need her to keep him that way."

  Idun nodded. "That we do." She opened her golden casket and took out an apple.

  Jerry used the first blade to hand—that was Gram—to cut a sliver off the apple, and insert it between Marie's lips. "Chew if you can. Even the juice helps."

  She did, weakly.

  Jerry, Liz and the rest of them watched. And then Idun shook her head. "It is not the wound. She must eat the entire apple now. There is much within that n
eeds it. The wound is a slight thing. The other, well . . ."

  She looked at Lamont, tears still wet on his cheeks, a look of incredulous hope on his face. "You are her husband?"

  He nodded.

  Smiling, she took out another apple. "Then you'd better eat this one. A young woman, as she will need to become to take her body back to before it was affected by this disease, would be too much for you otherwise. You'll need your stamina."

  Chapter 41

  Miggy Tremelo was amused by Melvin Steinmetz's sangfroid. The head of one of the nation's premier think tanks—an academic on steroids, so to speak—was handling the discussion with a Greek sphinx and an Egyptian dwarf-god as if he were sitting around a conference table in the Future Enterprise Institute or participating in a university seminar—instead of being perched on a mechanic's stool in the maintenance garage attached to Miggy's headquarters. They were having the meeting in the cavernous garage, of course, because Throttler wouldn't fit anywhere else.

  "If I understand this correctly, what this lady,"—Steinmetz nodded at the sphinx—"has just proved is that it is possible to travel though the Ur-Mythworlds without going through the pyramid."

  "Some of them, it would be better to say," cautioned Miggy.

  "But if I also have this correctly, the pyramid showed no growth as a result."

  Tremelo nodded. "That's right, Melvin. That could be because the Krim is no longer active in those Mythworlds as a result of Dr. Lukacs and the rest of his group's efforts."

  "But—" Steinmetz looked almost cross-eyed, for a moment. The thinktank president shook his head. "Miggy . . . have you considered the implications?"

  Tremelo chuckled. "I'd make a wisecrack here about people teaching their grandmothers to suck eggs, except I'm way too polite."

  Melvin winced, but half-smiled also, acknowledging the hit. "All right, point taken. You don't need to rub salt into my wounds. Obviously you have considered them"—he cocked his head a little—"and may I presume you came to the same conclusions I'm coming to?"

  "That the Mythworlds have an independent existence? That they are—in some sense, at least—real and not simply virtual constructs of the Krim?"

  "Or Krim constructs that have taken on a life of their own," Steinmetz said. "That strikes me as the most likely possibility."

  Miggy nodded. "Me, too." He jabbed a thumb at one of the university maintenance vans parked alongside a wall of the garage. "The fact that that vehicle was made by human beings doesn't mean that it's simply a figment of our imagination. It was before it was made, sure enough. Just a gleam in an automobile designer's eye, so to speak. But now it's as real as—"

  Grinning, Bes slapped his chest. "Me! I can prove it, too. You want me to crumple up the van?"

  A bit hastily, Tremelo said, "That won't be necessary, I think."

  Steinmetz was studying Bes a lot more intently than Miggy was comfortable with. As often as he and Melvin had clashed over policy issues in times past, Miggy was well aware that the man had a very keen mind. Until he was sure that Steinmetz was actually switching sides in the current dispute with the PSA, Tremelo really didn't want him probing too deeply into some of the other mysteries and conundrums that surrounded the pyramid and the Mythworlds.

  Right at the top of that list was the problem that Miggy himself had been wrestling with since the day after Jerry Lukacs and the others returned from the Greek Mythworld, bringing with them Bes and Athena.

  Why had Bes retained his powers—and Athena hadn't? The Greek goddess was still in police custody in Las Vegas, since no one had been able to figure out what else to do with her. Former goddess, rather, it would seem. If she had any divine powers they were not evident at all. She just seemed to be a spiteful, nasty middle-aged woman.

  There were a number of possible answers to that question. All of them were uncomfortable, and some were downright scary.

  Steinmetz now turned that sharp, considering gaze on Throttler. "So . . . she can operate from any sphinx image where there is even a modicum of belief in that universe. What that would seem to imply is that the sphinx, yes, and Bes, have acquired at least demi-god status in our universe. We're still in the realm of guesswork here but belief seems to be very powerful stuff, not constrained by the terms of ordinary logic."

  Miggy hesitated. Melvin had seized upon the most obvious of the possible explanations, and one that was unsettling but not nearly as disturbing as some others. Tremelo was tempted to leave it at that. But his innate honesty rebelled a little. Clash as they might, from time to time, he and Steinmetz were basically colleagues. You didn't leave colleagues needlessly groping in the dark.

  "I don't think that theory holds up, Melvin. Yes, you might be able to explain Bes' continued powers as being due to the fervor of wrestling fans. Just as you could explain Athena's lack of such being due to the fact that she has no equivalent . . . let's call it 'fan base.' The problem is Lamont Jackson."

  Steinmetz narrowed his eyes. "Explain, please. I'm not following you."

  "It's simple. Why did Lamont Jackson keep his Tyche-bestowed luck for a time—but only for a time? That he still had it when he came out of the pyramid was blindingly obvious by the wealth he piled up so rapidly. Within two days, he'd been banned from every casino in Las Vegas; within a week, any in the world; within two weeks, every state lottery in the U.S. had done the same. By then, of course, Lamont was a multimillionaire several times over. But then that same luck vanished overnight, when his wife Marie turned out to be dying from a particularly virulent form of cancer. And if that didn't prove the luck had gone, having himself and most of his family snatched back into the pyramid surely did."

  Miggy made a groping motion with his hand, in midair. "How do you explain that, Melvin? It certainly can't be from any lack of faith in the country—the whole world over—in luck."

  "Maybe . . ." Steinmetz ran fingers through his thick gray hair. "Argh. I swear, Miggy, a particle physicist like you may be used to it. But this stuff makes even a hard-bitten old nuclear war theorist like me feel like a fish out of water—and you know how screwball most of our theories were."

  "Still are," grunted Tremelo humorously. "But if it makes you feel any better, this hard-bitten old particle physicist feels the same way."

  Steinmetz sat up a little straighter. "All right. But no matter what theories you lean toward, the thing that now seems very apparent—"

  Tremelo cut him off. "—is that directly intervening in the pyramid is at least possible, because there has got to be some basis for reality in there that doesn't depend on the Krim. Yes, I understand that, Melvin. And I'm willing, for the first time, to start considering the matter. But I've got one condition, and it's absolute."

  "You run the show. Not the PSA."

  "Yes. If you agree to that, we can keep talking."

  "Agreed," came Steinmetz's immediate reply. "You understand, I can only speak for myself. Well, and the institute. I sided with the defense industry and their political spokesmen, but I never had their vested interest in the answer. They did and still do—and they don't call them 'vested interests' for nothing. They're not going to let up, Miggy."

  Tremelo shrugged. "No—but they just took a bad hammering in Congress, too. Senator Larsen tells me he doesn't think he can get APSA repealed outright, but he's dead sure he can get the worst provisions altered. And he also thinks he's got a very good chance of getting all operational efforts involving the pyramid placed clearly and unequivocally under the authority of the Pyramid Scientific Research Group."