I hadn’t triggered my magical sight yet, because there was so much magic as well as actual gods flying around on the field that I figured it would be blinding. But it might also be the best way to end things: Taking out Hel would at least allow us to make significant progress against the horde. Some of the slain Álfar were beginning to rise from the dead, and since I was near them I needed to keep an eye out now for that as well as for draugar.
I backed away from the fight somewhat before I switched my vision over. Being on the fringe and camouflaged allowed me that space. I triggered the charm on my necklace to the magical spectrum and had to blink and squint to filter through what I was seeing. The draugar had their own magic signature, and the Olympians were blinding white silhouettes off to the left. The Álfar, meanwhile, had plenty of magic baked into their armor. Except one of them nearby—quite close by—had a whole lot of extra something going on. His was a shifting riot of colors, magically speaking, and I had only seen a signature like that once before.
“Coyote?” I said. “Is that you?”
The elf slid a spear neatly in and out of a draugr’s eye and then turned to me with a smirk that was familiar even on another face. He slipped out of formation and came over to stand next to me, even though I was practically invisible.
“Sure is, Mr. Druid. Took you long enough to notice.”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, just slayin’ the undead like one o’ them regular elves, lookin’ down this long white nose at everybody, feelin’ fancy. Kinda wonderin’ what these fellers use to wash their hair.” He looked down at the thick braid falling down his chest and sniffed. “Smells like pears or something.”
“Maybe you could ask later. I was just going to try to find Hel.”
“Oh, you were? Might be able to save you a bit of trouble.” A draugr broke through the Álfar line and came after him, but he dodged the blow. I raised my blade and he said, “No, no, don’t kill it! I need one alive for a few seconds. Can you hold on to it?”
“For maybe a second. They’re strong and they can become incorporeal.” Though in truth I had not tried to put one in a hammerlock yet. Perhaps my cold iron aura would interfere with its ability to go ghostly and would keep it solid.
“Try, will ya?”
I dropped and swept the draugr’s legs, a move it wasn’t expecting at all, and it landed heavily on the ground. I stomped on the flat of its sword, pinning it to the ground to make sure it didn’t go anywhere, and Coyote leaned over on the other side, grabbing the bony left hand as if he were going to help it get up. The draugr was clearly confused, since neither of us seemed ready to kill it, and its wonder grew as Coyote’s appearance shifted and rippled from the hand, from that of an elf to…a draugr that looked exactly like the one we have on the ground. A perfect copy, down to the smell and the exposed innards kept in by a shredded curtain of muscle. The trickster even had the rusty chain armor and helmet, the ratty leather boots, and a scrap of something belted around the waist.
“Okay, Mr. Druid,” Coyote’s new voice rattled. “You can kill it now.”
I shoved Fragarach into the thing’s face and it twitched once and expired. An ambitious elf who saw the new draugr behind the lines came over to take care of him, but I cried a warning, dropped my camouflage, and stepped in front of Coyote. I had to block a strike and shout in Old Norse before the elf got the idea he should stand down.
“This one’s on our side,” I explained, leaving out that Coyote is not a draugr at all. “He’s going to lead us to Hel and help us take her down so she doesn’t keep raising the dead.” I half-turned to Coyote and muttered in English, “Smile and nod so he knows you’re friendly.”
Coyote waved at the elf with a twinkle-fingered flutter and tried to smile with his ruined, half-rotted face.
We wound up employing the elf to get us back through the line. I cast camouflage again and put a left hand on Coyote’s shoulder as the elf led us to the front and made sure we didn’t get cut down by any other elves. We were expelled into the horde and the draugar ignored Coyote as one of their own, flowing around him and showing zero interest in why he was going the wrong way. I followed in his wake and asked him where we were going.
“Hel’s up on the hill, where she can maintain a view. I can see her from here.”
“You can?” To me it was still a wash of magic, nothing distinct.
“Sure.”
“Is Loki nearby?”
“He was earlier, but I don’t see him now. Say, Mr. Druid, I’ve been wondering: If one o’ them purty elves back there eats a burrito and poots, you think it smells like buttercups or something?”
“That would require them to have floral agents in their intestines.”
“You say that like they don’t. I bet they take supplements—poot supplements—to make them smell good. I want some so I can poot on people and have ’em compliment me on how fine it smells.”
“It’s good to have goals, Coyote.”
“Heck yes. Fresh Poot Supplements would be a revelation if you made them available to humans. Folks would just be rippin’ poots in cars and elevators without fear of embarrassment, because it would smell so fine. They’d probably eat more sauerkraut and beans. It would change the world and its standards of etiquette. It might even become polite to poot on someone when you first meet them.”
If that seemed like an odd conversation to have in the middle of a battle, it was because our progress against the tide of undead was less than swift. It gave Coyote time to share his theories about elf poots and gave me plenty of time to look around and see the battle from the enemy’s perspective.
The forces defending humanity looked pitifully small. Odin had ordered the Vanir and Einherjar forward to reinforce the center and support the flanks as well, but it appeared that Thor was summoning mist around them to hide the gods from view. Why would he do that, unless the Norse had some way of seeing through it?
My answer came perhaps a couple of minutes later, after watching Brighid’s army meet the draugar and do somewhat better. They were at least cutting down more draugar than the others: The yewmen had come to the front and were taking plenty of punishment, while other Fae thrust forward with spears in between to slay the draugar. Better tactics. Brighid herself was fighting among them. The Olympians continued to run amok in the midst of the draugar, thinking themselves invincible, until Loki struck back.
Ares was the first to fall, with an impossibly well-placed arrow finding the eye slot in his helmet and piercing into his brain. Mars fell the same way seconds later, and that’s when Zeus and Jupiter realized that this wasn’t a playground. They scanned the slope of the volcano for the source of the arrows and I suppose they found it, after a fashion, since they fell out of the sky with arrows protruding from their skulls too. I wondered if, once they re-spawned back on Olympus, they would look back at their brief participation in this battle and recognize their hubris. They had done very little damage for having such great reputations.
And that’s when I remembered that Loki had stolen the Lost Arrows of Vayu from Granuaile in India, though I supposed now they must now be considered the Found Arrows. Those were long-distance godslayers, each of them enchanted to find its target. Very similar to Odin’s spear, Gungnir, which always hit its target, or Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir. Hermes and Mercury went down next, having never found where Hel and Loki were hiding in the mob.
At least the mist around the Norse gods made sense now. Loki couldn’t target them if he couldn’t see them. But neither could the Norse gods really let loose with the threat of those arrows out there. Loki had effectively neutralized them.
Though he had really pissed off the remaining Olympians. Athena, Minerva, and the Apollos sped up from their patient, workmanlike pace of battle to reckless abandon. If they were going to be taken down by arrows too, they wanted to leave some mark on the field. But no further shafts appeared in godly skulls. Loki must have a limited supply, and he was almost certainly saving one for Odin.
The ones he’d let fly, however, could be recovered and shot again. In the teeming mass of bodies, I couldn’t see if any draugar were currently bent to the task of recovering arrows, but Loki would be a fool not to at least make the attempt. If one of the Apollos, for example, got hold of one of those arrows, it could be employed against him.