My hands twitched. Cool air poured into my lungs. It seemed an odd sensation and took several minutes to register. I stirred in surprise, wondering if I'd died, and discovered that my cheek rested solidly on the rifle butt I had thought still lay a good foot ahead of me. I managed to flex my fingers and when they closed, one of the canteens was under them. For a moment all I did was lie there, touching first one piece and then another of my gear, foolishly, while salt water dripped off the end of my nose. Then I sniffed half sheepishly and forced my hands into action.
It took me fifteen minutes, by the fitful, faint glow of my watch's tritium dial, to stuff my gear back into the pack, and fumble with the closures. For several moments, I lay still again, gathering my strength. The initial euphoria had worn off. I didn't feel much sense of accomplishment, and thought I should have. All I felt was tired. Grateful; but so deadly tired. At least I was still alive and crawling. All I could do was keep moving.
Which I did, endlessly.
And then, maybe an hour, maybe a day, later, the pack teetered and began to slide beyond my fingertips. For a split second I was caught by surprise; then I lunged forward and grabbed at a strap—only to have the whole floor skitter away beneath me.
For an awful moment I dug in with my toes and clutched at the pack while hundreds of tiny somethings bounced and slid and dragged at me in the dark. None of them seemed to be crawling, which was too bad, because I was hungry enough to eat anything that didn't eat me first. I had hoped to run across some of the blind fish or crabs I'd read inhabited deep caves; but so far had found nothing of the sort. Maybe live animals couldn't survive for very long in Niflheim's outer reaches?
The thought did not comfort me.
The movement around me finally skittered to a stop and I reached out a tentative hand. A shallow slope fell away directly in front of me, ending in another stone floor. This, in turn, fell at a sharp angle off to my left, and climbed just as sharply up past my right. Both surfaces—the little slope and the angled floor—were littered with chips of stone.
Squirming carefully onto my side, I felt for the roof that had lain fractions of an inch above my head for days. It wasn't there. I eased forward until I could roll over and brace myself; then sat up slowly, clenching my teeth as weight settled onto a tailbone that had seen entirely too much abuse. It felt like I needed stitches. I just hoped infection didn't set in.
Once my gear was secured, I crawled to my knees and braced myself with widely planted feet. Strapping on my butt pack hurt. I washed my cut knees and bandaged them with strips cut from underwear rescued from my pack.
A refill of the canteens slaked my raging thirst, although I was careful to drink gradually, to avoid bloating myself and getting sick. I finally refilled both canteens again and put them back in their carriers. Then I aimed as far out as possible to keep from contaminating my water supply and emptied my aching bladder.
My immediate needs taken care of, I sat still and listened. All I could hear was water trickling away downslope.
First question: Where was I now?
Second question: How big was the cavern I'd stumbled upon?
Third question . . .
No, better take things slowly and in order.
I scrounged for a bit of stone and tossed it straight up. It arced up through the darkness, then—much later—hit ground slightly downslope. Several more tosses—thrown much harder—also failed to disclose the ceiling. Just how big was this cave? Another barrage placed an unbroken wall opposite me, sixty feet or more away. Chips of stone tossed downslope to my left arced in silence for a long way; then fell slithering into more stone chips without hitting another wall.
I turned to my right. And very nearly slid off my perch.
Light! Just a flicker, blue, and incredibly faint, but unmistakably—
Gone.
I closed my eyes and reopened them. Nothing. I swore shakily. Great, my vision was going. I closed my eyes again, letting the muscles relax, and looked again.
Three pinpricks of white light . . .
Jesus, what was going on up there? I started to crawl to my knees, still watching, and two of the lights winked out. A moment later a reddish flicker appeared. I sank down again, staring until my eyes dried out so painfully they began to tear over. During the seconds it took to blink and rehydrate, the lights vanished altogether.
Either my eyes were completely out of kilter, or there was something weird as perdition going on at the far end of this cave. I allowed my eyes to rest for over two minutes, then while the lids were still closed, unholstered my HK P-7, brought it up into firing position, and looked. The tritium sights glowed eerily right where they were supposed to be, not flickering, not winking out, just sitting there doing exactly what they were supposed to. Nothing glowed anywhere else near them except my watch face.
I reholstered the pistol and gazed up at the far end of the cave, where everything remained dark. Had I stumbled into a mine shaft, maybe? Bjornssen hadn't said anything about mines in this area, and I'd never heard of blue or red carbide lamps. Besides, I didn't hear a thing, and mining sounds surely would carry over a great distance.
I thought about trying to hike up the slope, and even started out in that direction, but discovered almost immediately that climbing uphill through those stone chips was essentially impossible. For every step I took, I slid backward three. Then I noticed that my knife was rocking in severe agitation. I turned back, sliding carefully with one hand on the wall until I was back at the exit of my little tunnel. Weird lights or no, my journey apparently led deeper into the cave, not toward the surface.
Which only made sense. Niflheim had to lie farther down. And the knife was tugging insistently on my boot, urging movement in that direction. So I turned to my left, and noticed that the darkness wasn't quite as intense lower in the tunnel. There was no discernible light source, or even a hint of one; just an almost imperceptible lessening of the blackness.
All right.
I hauled myself to my feet, grabbed hold of the wall, and took an exploratory step.
Moving downhill proved almost as impossible as struggling uphill, with one notable exception. I quickly discovered that shuffling worked better than striding or even gingerly mincing along, a fact I discovered only after slipping and riding on my ass down a sixty-degree rock slide for nearly thirty feet.
That was the unhappy exception. I could always slide into Niflheim, so long as I didn't mind being slashed to ribbons by the time I got there. The whole floor was carpeted with stone chips, boot-lace deep in places, and each one was as sharp as an obsidian scalpel. My butt pack and trousers were slashed all to hell by the time I managed to stop that first wild skid. At this rate, I'd be bare-ass naked by the time I found Sleipnir.
I stuck closer to the walls after that, where the chips were shallower than out toward the center. The walls were nearly smooth under my hands. There was no noticeable variation in the angle of either the floor or the walls. I was moving down a near-perfectly straight, sharply angled chute through the heart of a mountain.
What were the odds against such a tunnel existing?
I supposed volcanic action might account for it; but I wasn't sure if there'd ever been volcanic activity around here. I wasn't a physicist, and certainly not a geologist, and I was far too exhausted to figure any of it out even if I'd had relevant data. At this point I was lucky to add two and two and come out with four.
—Hell, in this cave, twenty-two might be the correct answer.
The tunnel grew steadily lighter as I pushed deeper. I had no clue as to where the light source might be. The darkness had taken on a definite grey quality, vaguely reminiscent of the light on a hazy, overcast night, out away from any big cities. Not quite black, but not quite light enough to see anything clearly, either.
Who'd said Hell was murky? Probably Miss Wilkes, from sophomore English.
At least, it sounded like something she might've said.
Fifteen minutes later I could actually see the wall. It didn't look hewn or cut by any method I'd ever heard of; but it was straight as you please, and there was hardly a bump or snag anywhere. I stood still long enough to catch my breath and ease leg cramps; then pushed on, my curiosity building even more rapidly than the light.
A short time later a wide black crack appeared. Another fissure; only this one ran vertically, whereas mine had snaked in horizontally. I stood still and rested my hand on the smooth edge. I was aware that I was incredibly lucky to be out of that fissure alive.
Glancing back briefly, I saw more flashes of light. Blue, yellow; then darkness. I shrugged and started to turn away when a new set of flashes appeared, brighter than the others. The air began to vibrate, as with a half-sensed thunderstorm still out of sight over the horizon.
Bemused, I stood transfixed. The lights teased my retinas, dancing, swaying, flaring steadily brighter, while the air beat at my eardrums. Even when my ears popped it wasn't enough to cope with the rapidly building overpressure. The lights were a kaleidoscope gone mad, shifting down the long dark tunnel, rushing closer as though space itself were collapsing.
The back of my brain whispered a warning to the front, and an urgent tugging at my calf clamored for attention; but I wasn't listening. What the blazes could it be? Landslide? Earthquake? Volcanic eruption? No, that'd have to come from below, not above. Wouldn't it?
I stood there beside the fissure with my mouth hanging open, staring as the flood of lights and noise rushed at me out of the darkness, and didn't have the sense to get out of the way. My ears popped again and a freight train noise roared in my ears, its thunder shaking the very walls. My teeth rattled and I squinted against brilliant light. It leaped off the floor as high as my head, showering in fountains and spurts like molten steel.
With the air a solid wall of sound beating at me, instinct finally took over and shoved me into the fissure, bruising ribs and tearing open my injured back and knees again. I yelled and heard nothing but the roar permeating the rocks. I found myself panting as terror took hold. Then I forced myself to face whatever it was that was sweeping down the cave.
Thunder hurt my skull. Stone chips stung my face.
Then I saw the eyes.
Thunder, lights, cave—all vanished into an ice-filled night, with those eyes gouging my soul as they hunted fresh prey. . . .
Thunder crashed back into my awareness. The bottom dropped out of the air pressure as Sleipnir tore past. Every footfall struck explosions of sparks. I stuck my head completely into the open, staring, while the wind sucked air out of my lungs.
He was immense; yet he was out of sight almost immediately, disappearing into the gloom downslope. The thunder gradually receded and the flying sparks vanished with it. When the wind of his passage finally died away, I took a long, deep breath and released it slowly.
Well . . .
The cave's ceiling had to be at least two hundred feet high, didn't it? Then I snorted. That was a stupid, irrelevant thought, for damned sure.
I chewed my upper lip thoughtfully, gazing down the tunnel after Sleipnir. Too bad Bjornssen wasn't here to see this. Niflheim couldn't be far away now, and at least I had graphic confirmation that Sleipnir did, indeed, visit the underworld.
I looked back up that impossible tunnel, which ran through a cave where physical laws didn't work quite properly, and saw more flickers of light. I knew now that I could never have climbed up out of this tunnel, even if I'd fought the slope and the boot-deep stone chips until my lungs burst and my muscles gave out. This was Sleipnir's private passage to Niflheim, connecting the branches of Yggdrasil with the World Tree's great roots, in a link that only Sleipnir could cross.
Briefly I wondered where the fissure into which I was now jammed might lead; then decided I didn't care. There were nine worlds altogether, and not all of them were friendly to human life. Hell, some weren't even on speaking terms with the gods.
I glanced back up Sleipnir's great tunnel. The moist chill of the cave sank into my flesh and settled in my belly. How had I found my way into Sleipnir's private passage? Had I really gotten past that stalactite in the fissure? Or had Odin heard my angry challenge and answered it?
The chill deepened and I shook myself vigorously. It didn't bear thinking about. Besides, for a dead man, I hurt in a hell of a lot of places. I watched another light flicker into life at the top of the tunnel and wondered if those tiny lights were the stars, silent in the vault above the World Tree. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, not even death. Dead or alive, I'd found my way into Niflheim.
Sleipnir was waiting.