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 wasimmense ; 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 thegods .

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 deadman, 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.

Chapter Eleven.

The glow that grew out of the darkness was green.

Not the warm, earthy green of gardens and manicured lawns; but a nasty, weird color somewhere between emerald and sickly yellow. Once, when I was about seven, I'd seen the whole sky turn just that color. When the storm was over, and the tornado gone, pieces of our toolshed, a neighbor's house, and three big live oaks were distributed all over one end of the county. I noticed that my feet had slowed and stopped by themselves, and after a moment's thought I decided they were right. I sat down in the stone chips. No sense just rushing in . . .

Not a waver of movement, not a hint of sound. Everything was utterly dead both behind and before me. Even the trickling of the stream was subdued; the water slid noiselessly along the wall. So what was I waiting for? An engraved invitation? I chewed the end of my thumbnail and rubbed my other hand palm-down against my trousers. It didn't do any good; sweat had already soaked what was left of my clothes.

I spit out bits of ragged thumbnail. I'd worked harder to get where I was now than I'd ever worked at anything in my life. I couldn't just sit on my ass now that I was so close. Maybe striving for a goalwas a lot better than reaching it. Now that I was this close . . .

Bull. The only thing wrong with me was a case of nerves like I hadn't had since Mary Lou Meyerson first showed me what the backseat of a Ford was for. I looked at the green glow ahead and discovered that I didn't have the faintest idea what to expect out there. Despite all my "research," I really didn't know what I was going to find. Fighting thirst and underground rivers and even terrorists-I was trained for that kind of battle. But how much would my training be worth in Niflheim, where even the gods went when they died?

I reached down into the stubborn core of myself, where I'd found the strength to haul my ass up out of that icy underground river, and lurched to my feet. Then I stumbled forward into the green light. I was barely aware of the hum against my calf where Gary's long knife rode patiently. The slope of the floor gradually leveled out until it was nearly horizontal again. The distant ceiling had long since disappeared into green gloom overhead. Muted echoes of my footsteps bounced back. The walls began to curve away as well, although not nearly as far as the ceiling.

The eerie glow brightened until I was bathed in ghastly green. Then I emerged from the tunnel onto the verge of a gravel beach. My feet stopped of their own accord and my eyes widened. And widened.

I stood there long enough for both feet to go to sleep, just staring, and feeling awfully small. . . .

The cavern which stretched before me hadJourney to the Center of the Earth beat all hollow, as it were. The "ceiling" was miles overhead; parts of it were dark, almost black, with streaks and splotches and whorls of brighter color just the shade of the green light. Bright patterns glowed with cold phosphorescence, like fireflies, or those deep-sea fish I'd seen inNational Geographic . As I watched, entranced, I could see the patterns moving, changing, sliding into darkness while the darkness blossomed slowly into light.

An odd sense of familiarity niggled at the back of my mind, but I couldn't place it, and soon gave up, lost in the eeriness on every side. The whole landscape was lit by that unearthly green glow, even my skin and fingernails. My skin looked like algae, while my fingernails were a darker olive shade. My knife, peeping out of its sheath, still looked dead-flat black.

The rocky beach extended five yards in front of me. Beyond stretched a body of what looked like oil but smelled like water. The surface was as flat black as my knife, with peculiar green glints. Not a ripple disturbed it, as far as my eyes could see. It reminded me of something, a place I'd read about,where oily pitch oozed to the surface of the ground to snare the unwary. . . . Heavy mist hung like curtains across patches of it, in places obscuring even the "sky." Whatever it was, it stretched off into infinity to both left and right, while directly across, so low it looked no more than a slight thickening of water, a dark smudge suggested a headland jutting toward me.

Just at the-water's?-edge stood a ruined structure of some sort, rising from the beach in a gentle slope to extend fifteen or twenty feet out over the lightless water. It had broken off-or something had broken it-leaving jagged edges to project above the smooth black surface below. The posts and ramp might once have been a dull gold; but now only hints of muted color clung to the grey stone. A bridge, maybe, that had collapsed?

Gauging the distance to the far shore, it must've been one hell of a span. I didn't see any sign of support pillars out there. Silence hung heavily in my ears. I could hear my breath rasping in my lungs.

When I took a step forward to get a closer look at the ruined bridge, echoes of the loud crunch seemed to continue forever, disappearing across the misty horizon.

I stopped again, uncertain in the aftermath of that first loud noise, and scuffed a toe while deliberating on courage.

Blood froze in my veins, leaving my face stiff and cold. I knelt, and ran a disbelieving hand through the "gravel." Bones. Millions of them. Billions of them. Finger bones. Toe bones. Vertebrae. Wing bones. Tiny rodent skulls. Claws. Dull, greenish-white, and brittle as shale, the bones ran along the shore until it curved out of sight into the mist.

I thought some more about courage, wondering what it might feel like if I had any, and heard a faint sound, almost like a sigh of wind.

I looked up, glanced up and down the beach, then out across the water. I don't know what I expected to see; but when I saw it, I went very still. There was movement on the black surface, far out but approaching rapidly. I watched it come for some moments; then decided that staying on my knees would make me look entirely too overawed. Not that Iwasn't ; I just didn't want to give that impression.

So I stood, and noticed I was breathing hard-and much too fast.

My fingers were gritty, so I brushed bone dust off my hands, wiping it onto my pants, where it clung like glue to the sweaty cloth. My boots were thick with the stuff, which coated the damp leather where I'd crushed brittle, dry bones into powder with my living weight.

Meanwhile, the object out on the water gradually took form, detaching from the black backdrop as it approached on a collision course with the ruined bridge support nearby.

Soon I could tell what it was: a flat-bottomed skiff, propelled by nothing I could see. A series of gentle ripples patently at odds with its speed ran from the front, along the sides, and out behind the back.

The prow rose into twin poles topped by human skulls. The sides were black, writhing with the intricately twined bodies of carved black snakes. Eyes and fangs gleamed silver throughout the hideous pattern.

Standing in the bow was a gaunt old woman with long, greasy hair that no comb in the world could have untangled. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes were hollow, her whole body no more substantial than the bones I'd ground into dust. Her skin looked like the flaky piecrust from a TV commercial-but I didn't think a starving Ethiopian would've touched a piecrustthat color.

The skiff stopped just short of the beach and we stared at each other across the intervening stretch of bones. Her eyes swept me at a glance, noting the bloodied knee wrappings, the weapons, the battered pack and heavily laden web gear, and stopped only when they caught my gaze. An expression that might have been the beginnings of a scowl or a laugh crossed her face, gone before it could really register.

"You're alive," she said. Her voice produced not even the whisper of an echo.

I repressed a spontaneous shudder and waited.

"Only the dead find their way here. Why have you come?"

The ball was in my court and abruptly I felt like a peewee-league runt going one-on-one againstKareem Abdul-Jabar. Confronting a pack of gods on their home court suddenly didn't seem like the great idea it had once been. . . . Under her penetrating gaze, I felt all too mortal, standing as I was on the bones of what might've been my own ancestors. I managed to check my virtually galvanic impulses, and -for a change-didn't answer flippantly.

There was no telling what this-woman?-might do or know.

"I'm looking for Odin." I winced at the thousands of echoes which bounced from water to "sky"

and down again.

A grin split her face. She raised a hand and pointed to a spot behind me.

"Warriors looking for Odin find him by hanging on the tree."

I turned, already knowing what I would find but compelled to look anyway. A lightning-blasted oak had risen from the bone beach right behind me. The shattered trunk was rotten with the smell of death. Corpses swung from every twisting branch, ropes knotted tightly around decaying necks, spears plunged between the exposed bones of rib cages. Some had decayed until only the furs and helmets of Viking warriors clothed the bones; others had been strangled only last week, still clothed in flesh under uniforms of khaki, black, and olive drab. The congealed blood staining their chests looked black.

A moment ago there'd been nothing on that spot but beach, and now the stench sent me stumbling backward, trying desperately not to think about Hohenfels and Gary.

"And what will you say to Odin when you stand before him, human?" The old woman's voice called my attention back to the shore. "Will you ask to see Loki, where he lies bound?"

Loki! How in seven hells had the old witch known that? I stared down at my knife, suddenly aware of the focus of the old woman's keen interest. The knife lay quietly in its sheath, pretending to ignore me.

Was the damned blade a mind reader? If it knew, Odin knew, and had maybe warned this disgusting old hag-unlessshe was the mind reader? Damn . . .

I tried to look unconcerned, and knew I failed utterly. Meanwhile, the old crone just watched me, and her eyes glittered.

How had she known I was after Loki? Loki-who, for the sheer reckless fun of putting the rest of the gods in his debt, had turned himself into a mare to help the gods weasel out on a deal they'd struck with a frost giant. Odin and his crew had broken their contract, and Loki ended up giving birth to a baby horse-Sleipnir. The biology was impossible, of course; but I'd decided, not long ago, that I would never again say anything was impossible.

I glanced up. The old witch was watching me with eyes that glittered like polished bone. She might or might not know that I needed Loki's help to catch his son. Right?Right .

"Yes," I answered, meeting the old crone's eyes. "I do seek a word with Loki."

Hollow eyes narrowed to slits. I could smell the stink of my own fear sweat and hoped to god-to God?-that she couldn't smell it, too.

"And when you speak to Loki," she said, her voice bitter as wormwood, "will you tell him of life's pleasures?" Oddly her eyes had the look of a person who knows he is going to die, and is determined to take as many of his killers with him as he can. Fever-bright, they burned like coals in the deep black hollows of her face. I found myself clutching the P-7.

"Yeah. Sure."

A laugh ran like ice along my skin.

"It is worth the trip to see that one squirm," she cackled, my presence almost forgotten in her glee. I stood sweating on the beach. "Come, human," the old woman commanded, gesturing imperially. "Loki awaits your pleasure."

I glanced over my shoulder to look back up Sleipnir's great tunnel. Then I drew a quick breath, forced myself to let go of the pistol, and climbed over the broken bridge. I dropped carefully into the skiff. To my surprise, my weight didn't cause the craft to so much as bob in the water.

A chill crawled along my spine as the skiff moved silently away from shore, heading for the distant blur on the horizon. My hair lay glued to my head from what felt like (and might have been) weeks ofaccumulated sweat, oil, and dirt. The remnants of my clothes flapped loosely on my frame. The bow churned up no froth in the black water, just gentle ripples that caught the far-off green of the ceiling and flung it back into my eyes.

I turned to look at the crone. She was wrapped in a filthy black cloak. The tattered edges of the garment writhed in the wind like living snakes. A shudder caught me unawares, and I hastily turned to study the inside of the skiff.

It was black inside as well as out, and completely watertight. None of the strange black water found its way inside. I wondered what they'd used to waterproof the wood, and if the substance had caused the black coloration. That wouldn't explain the silver eyes and fangs, though, unless they'd been added afterward, applied like gold leaf.

Beside the ancient woman's feet, rolling slightly on the floor, rested a bowl made of dried, whitened bone. It looked like a human skull case. There were a few disks inside that gleamed dully metallic in the green light. A long pole lay beside it, one end decorated with a wicked iron hook and the other with the polished skull of a wolf, the dark brown color of museum bones. I hoped the old woman used the hook for mooring the skiff-it had lethal potentials I didn't even want to think about.

"What thoughts are in your head, mortal?"

Her raspy voice-snake scales slithering across dry rock-reached over the sound of the wind, apparently without effort. I turned reluctantly to meet her gaze.

"This sea-what is it called?" I gestured out to the horizon.

Her cackle filled my ears. "This is no sea, human. This is the River Gjoll, flowing out of the great wellspring Hvergelmir, which feeds all the rivers of Niflheim. Gjoll is Hel's river-it flows past her gate."

She laughed again. "Living men are not welcome in her hall, little man. Hel prefers them newly dead.

Shall we oblige her?"

Before I could even try to frame an answer, she was talking again.

"Loki's kin, she is, full blood daughter, and sent here by Them above as don't trust her. Give Hel the dead to satisfy her, They said, and she won't look to Asgard with greed in her eye." The old woman's laugh wheezed with every sentence. "Comes the hour when the sons of Muspell ride, and Hel will have Asgard; aye, in flames. And I, Modgud, will stand and watch as I've done through these long centuries."

Just when I thought the bombast had ended, Modgud's eyes caught mine and held them.

"I'll watch for Loki's fall in the Final Battle, I will, the great Ragnarok, and I'll laugh when I see him down. His groaning and fighting to be free of the Rocks shook the earth and broke my lovely bridge. . .