I tried an old trick that had worked on the Fir Bolgs once: I had the earth soften and then tighten around his paws to keep him immobile. But it failed because the earth was almost completely drained of juice near the portal. The land was going dead and it didn’t have the strength to hold on to Garm—but it did trip him, and he went down with a howl, crushing several draugar underneath him and perhaps getting stabbed with their weapons in the process. He’d be up in a moment, though, and pretty soon I’d be running out of juice to maintain my camouflage. I’d be visible and far away from any help in the middle of a sea of enemies.
“That got her attention,” Coyote reported. “She’s looking at her hound now.”
“She is?”
Coyote pointed once again with his spear. “She’s the ugly one looking toward the hound. All the rest are looking forward at the front lines.”
Coyote’s phrasing left me a bit at sea: If Hel was the ugly member of the undead, which was the beautiful? I still couldn’t pick her out; his attempts to point to her were like waving at a colony of fire ants and saying, “That one!” But his assertion that she was interested in Garm gave me an idea. “Okay, I’m going to keep messing with the hound and you keep leading us to her. If she’s not paying attention to us, you might be able to get a free shot.”
“Okay. You try to keep us from getting eaten. I’ll try not to lose sight of our target.”
On the one hand, I didn’t want to use any more of the earth’s energy, but on the other, it was going to get used anyway and I also didn’t want to die. Garm needed a distraction, so I gave him one. I bound a bunch of draugr armor to his coat—all the leather stuff, which was in many cases connected to metal stuff and to the draugar themselves. They could phase right out of it and probably would, but in a few seconds he had a lot of annoying extra weight on him, draugar being lifted toward his body and vice versa, a tug in both directions every time I completed a binding. Garm must have thought the draugar were attacking him, for he didn’t take kindly to it, turning around and biting at them as if they were saucy jumbo fleas.
“Attaboy,” Coyote said, and I thought he was talking to Garm at first, but then he added, “Keep that up. She’s moving closer to him. We don’t even have to change course.”
I hoped he was right. I hoped we would be able to pull this off all sneaky, in and out, change the course of the battle, and—
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“She’s looking around. She can smell the shenanigans.”
“Well, she can’t see me,” I said, just as all the earth went dead beneath my feet, its energy drained away, and my camouflage fizzled. I could recast it using stored energy from my bear charm, but I rather thought I’d need that for something else. I was quite visible and quite visibly alive in a sea of undead. And what’s more, Hel spotted me right away and shrieked in recognition. That allowed me to finally locate her: She had taken the trouble to make herself look entirely rotted instead of only half-rotted, but her eyes held burning scleras and if they indicated emotional heat then she was ablaze. She’d once asked me to join her side for Ragnarok and I’d refused. She’d been alone and outnumbered that day and we chased her off. It would be safe to say that the circumstances had changed.
I shoved Coyote forward as I drew Fragarach and said, “You’re not with me now!” hoping he’d get the idea that he should blend in. I kicked the draugr to my right to clear some space and expected to be overwhelmed shortly from all sides, but instead the draugar pulled away from me, and Coyote followed suit—because Hel was coming straight at me, charging down the mountain. Her assumed form of a draugr melted and shifted until she was the deity I had seen and smelled before, half living and half skinless putrid corpse. She grew as she approached, taking longer and longer strides, topping ten feet easily, and I had to rapidly reassess how I was going to fight someone that huge. The reach she now had far exceeded mine, and she had drawn her knife, Famine, out of her rib cage. Unlike Loki’s sword, Famine did not grow in proportion to the rest of Hel—probably because Loki was casting an illusion there—but her knife was a significant piece of cutlery regardless.
Hel’s stench arrived in advance of her actual person, and it was enough to make me wistful for the smell of pears in braided elf hair. I blinked and coughed, trying to keep my wits, and took a tiny step back even as Hel grunted and her eyes widened. Her hands splayed out in a desperate bid for balance, but it was too late. Physics had asserted its mastery over her person, because Coyote had expertly tripped her with the shaft of his spear as she passed him. She’d never expected to be tripped by one of her own draugar. And I hadn’t expected that either. The net result was that I scrambled away from her knife hand but couldn’t avoid being flattened by the other one as she crashed to the ground. It knocked the wind out of me and I remained still too long. A giant hand—Hel’s flesh-covered one—wrapped itself around my body and picked me up, trapping my arm against my side so that Fragarach was useless. She was still prone, so she didn’t raise me too high, but she slammed me back to earth again and it was less than gentle on my head. I saw lights blinking in my vision and felt nauseous—probably because she was bringing me up to her face and I got a lungful of her death breath. The side of her face that was exposed tissue and bone had wee maggots writhing in her cheek meat, and I first thought that those had to be distracting and then wondered madly why she hadn’t taken time to remove them on her big day.
“Druid,” she rasped. “Die now.” She wasn’t into small talk. Just enough gloating for me to appreciate my own defeat. Her other hand, the bony one with Famine in it, approached blade-first. I felt the cold steel press against the warm flesh of my throat and then slide across, sawing me open. Blood and air escaped and I silently triggered my healing charm as soon as she withdrew the blade, having no trouble at all relaying my panic in gurgles and wheezes. Because I’d only bought myself a little bit of time. When the blood stopped flowing, she’d have at it again and perhaps not content herself with merely slitting my throat. I had no options to retaliate, and she grinned with blackened teeth as my blood spilled onto her hand.
Abruptly her entire body jerked—including the hand with me in it—and her expression altered to one of surprise and then scrunched into a wince of pain. She began to shrink, and her hand could no longer wrap itself around my body. I flopped to the ground with all the grace of a stunned cod and hoped I’d be able to breathe and function again soon. But I saw a draugr atop Hel’s back, with its spear sunk into her torso. He was twisting it around like a swizzle stick, tearing up her organs with the bladed tip.
“Hey there, Mr. Druid!” Coyote called in his gravelly rasp. “This has been fun, but I expect I’ll be dying shortly. Looks like you will too. She got your throat, eh? Well, at least I won’t have to hear any more of your puns. And my people should be safe now.”
Coyote will never gain a reputation for kind farewells, but at least he had his priorities straight. The Norse goddess of death expired with a hoarse rattle and one final spasm, and the entire army of draugar flinched as one—at least, all of them that I could see surrounding me. I don’t know if they flinched at the front lines. But they didn’t melt away or explode in a puff of ash either. They looked around as if waking from sustained somnambulism, bereft of Hel’s guidance, and decided they weren’t really eager to march forward to face an army intent on destroying them. They started looking around for exits. And they were not interested at all in me or Coyote or the lifeless stank of Hel.
“What’s this, now?” Coyote said. “None of these fellers cares what I did? Whipped me up a batch of heart and lung marmalade right in front of them using one hundred percent rotten-goddess ingredients and they ain’t even the least bit mad?”
They wouldn’t be. They had no loyalty to Hel. Her realm was where no one wanted to go, and she had never treated them well. A howl tearing through the sky reminded us that at least one creature was loyal to Hel, however.
“Oh, shit,” Coyote said, which was what I was thinking but couldn’t say. Garm had freed himself of most if not all of the draugar and become aware that Hel was no more. He was a biggun, as they say, twelve feet tall, and even at a distance he could clearly see Coyote and me next to Hel’s body.