The Bones of Giants Page 3

  In all the years the late Trevor Bruttenholm had been his mentor, not to mention his adoptive father, Hellboy knew he had disappointed the man time after time with his lack of enthusiasm for study. But he remembered a little of what he had learned of Norse mythology. When he gazed up at the sky, it seemed to him no wonder that the Scandinavian peoples imagined their gods so much a part of the world. Far away in Asgard, yes, but also so very close.

  Klar wasn’t going to give them time to explore Stockholm, however. The agents from the Swedish government escorted Hellboy and Abe to the Swedish naval vessel Kiruna for the long journey north through the Gulf of Bothnia to the coastal city of Lulea. Abe retreated to their cabin almost immediately, but Hellboy spent some time on the deck. The crew gave him a wide berth, which was just fine, seeing that he did not speak Swedish. Klar passed him once or twice in a hurry and greeted him with a nod. Hellboy wondered exactly what the rush was. It wasn’t as though he had anywhere to go.

  Eventually, as the hours passed and they forged further north, the sky turned gray, and now its nearness seemed ominous rather than comforting. With the change in the weather, Hellboy at last went below. He found Abe reading in their stateroom, still wearing the thick wool sweater he had donned as soon as they got off the plane back in Stockholm. His skin had a pallid cast that concerned Hellboy.

  “You all right?”

  Abe nodded. “I just wish it was a little warmer in here.”

  They moored off Lulea and slept the night on shipboard. Klar roused them at five in the morning. The sky was already light this far north and Hellboy was heartened to see that the sun was out once more, but Abe buried himself beneath a thick parka with a hood, a fringe of fur framing his face. A number of wisecracks occurred to Hellboy, but one look from Abe and he thought better of it and kept silent. He only hoped that whatever Dr. Manning had sent them to investigate was truly as astonishing as the Bureau director had claimed, or Hellboy would never hear the end of it.

  Two large trucks awaited them in port, vehicles with thick tires wrapped in chains and laden with supplies as though they were heading out on a true Arctic expedition rather than merely visiting a northern village. Abe glared balefully at the gear in the back of their truck, then he sighed and climbed into the back­seat. Hellboy lifted himself up into the passenger seat and the truck rocked under his weight.

  Klar sat patiently behind the wheel as he strapped himself in.

  Hellboy glanced at him. “Okay. Let’s go. Mush.”

  A sort of scowl flickered across Klar’s face. “Mush?” he asked.

  “The faster we go, the sooner we come back,” Hellboy replied. He glanced into the backseat, but Abe had already closed his eyes and was breathing deeply, either asleep or on the way.

  Great, Hellboy thought with a sidelong glance at Klar. It looked like the ride was going to be packed with scintillating conversation.

  On the hilltop overlooking the Dalbard River, Karl Aronsson held up a hand to shield his face. It was not snowing, but the wind swept over the ground and pulled it up, driving old snow into the air in enough quantity that visibility was negligible. The gale was strong enough that, despite his bulk, Karl had to lean into it to keep from being knocked off balance.

  He wiped his goggles and looked down at the riverbank below. Despite the wind, from his vantage-point he could see his team spread out, planting stakes around the remains the old fisherman had found. Rope would be used to delineate the area and then once the corpse had been carefully removed, the dig would begin. Thus far, the weather had prevented them from photographing the discovery in its surrounding environs, or from taking samples of it on site. The wind would not last forever, but the lightning was an issue as well.

  As if summoned by his own thoughts, the sky lit up with a vein of electric light that cut through the driven snow. The thundercrack was deafening, even with the earmuffs Karl wore. His team, down there on the bank of the river, had earplugs in, and already they had begun to complain that it was not enough. The lightning made them all scurry away from the remains, and they gazed at the sky warily, as though they might be the next targets. Which was absurd. Though the frequency of the lightning strikes had slowed dramatically, even in the time since Karl and his team had arrived, its target was a constant. He was certain there was a scientific explanation, some sort of circuit that had been formed between the electrical activity in the atmosphere and the weapon clutched in the fingers of that corpse, but that was not his field.

  Whatever the explanation, they could not very well remove it until they knew that the circuit could be broken. None of them relished trying to move what was essentially the most consistently effective lightning rod in the world. And, if it came to that, they had not yet received government clearance to remove it anyway. Not that Karl cared very much for the role the government had decided to play in all this. It was an archaeological discovery, after all, not some spy satellite.

  And what a discovery it was. In all his life, he had never encountered such a significant find. If it was not a hoax, of course. He did not think it was, but until they had been able to test the remains there would be no way to truly know.

  The wind gusted even harder and Karl took a step back, taken off guard a moment. He turned his back to it and found himself looking down the other side of the hill toward where they had left their vehicles. Somewhere down there, the old fisherman, Kjell, sat in a truck awaiting the arrival of government representatives whom he hoped were going to reward him for reporting this find. Karl thought the only reward they might give him was a little publicity, which was almost certainly not what the old man had in mind.

  Again he wiped off his goggles, but as he turned back toward the riverbank he saw dark shapes moving in the valley below. The gale lashed all around him and the snow blotted out his vision a moment, but there came a sudden lull, and he could see that there were more vehicles in the valley. The dark shapes he had seen were people swathed in parkas and wearing goggles much like his own. Karl counted six of them, but there were two out in front, one of whom towered over all the others.

  Another sudden gust cast a shroud of white across the land again, wind whistling all around him, buffeting his entire body. The party below became nothing but dark shapes in the snow once more, and it was several minutes before they drew close enough that Karl could make them out. They seemed liked ghosts, as they loomed up from below, rising up the hillside as though drifting on the wind.

  He shielded his goggles again, trying to get a better look at them. When he spoke, he had to raise his voice to try to be heard over the storm. “Are you the American scientists?”

  The wind lessened and the two in front were perhaps ten feet away. Karl stared at them, eyes wide behind the lenses of his goggles. The huge one had skin the color of drying blood, and a long red tail thrust out behind him, swaying in the air. His enormous right hand seemed carved from stone. The other had green, reptilian flesh, and thin, inhuman lips, and he shivered with the cold.

  “Not exactly,” said the red man. “But we’re the closest you’re gonna get.”

  His hooves slid on the snow-covered hill and Hellboy planted them more firmly. From what he had learned on the ride up, this Karl Aronsson was a professor from Stockholm University and, despite what Klar’s arrogance implied, it was really the university that was in charge of this site. Professor Aronsson seemed odd at first, staring at Hellboy and Abe like he’d forgotten for a moment what he was doing there in the first place. Then he smiled, the grin barely notice­able above the rim of the thick scarf around his neck.

  “You’re Hellboy,” the rotund man said. “I’ve heard of you.”

  “He’s a celebrity,” Abe said dryly.

  Hellboy held out his left hand and Aronsson shook it.

  “A pleasure,” the professor said.

  “Likewise. This is Abe Sapien. He’s also with the BPRD. It’s been a long trip, Professor. Maybe you could show us exactly what it is that the Bureau sent us up here
for.”

  “Of course, of course.” Aronsson glanced at Klar and hesitated a moment, a look of distaste on his features. Then he turned and started down the hill. Hellboy and Abe followed, with the government monkeys in tow.

  The hill sloped down toward a river nobody had bothered to tell Hellboy the name of, and they picked their path carefully. Stones thrust up from the ground at intervals, and several of the government men paused at each of these spots to reassure themselves of their footing. Hellboy paid them little notice. His attention was instead upon the people who milled about on the riverbank, busying themselves with measurements and hammering stakes and digging soil samples or some such. He could not really tell what they were digging for because of the windstorm and the snow that blew all around, whipping against him.

  Then they were on a ledge five feet above the riverbank and Hellboy squinted, not sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. In the midst of this buzz of activity, like the queen in the hive, was the withered corpse of a man who would have been at least as tall and broad as Hellboy had he still lived.

  “Long lost brother, you think?” Abe asked beside him.

  Hellboy frowned and shot him a dark look, then dropped off the ledge to land with a crunch of snow and earth on the riverbank. A woman chipping at the rocky wall of the ledge jumped, startled by his sudden arrival. She let out a little cry and backed against the wall, eyes wide.

  “Sorry,” Hellboy said, a bit sheepish.

  The woman glanced up quickly to see Professor Aronsson climbing down a tall metal ladder that had been set against the ledge. The others were gathered at the top awaiting their turn. When she saw him, the woman seemed to calm down a bit, and even spoke a few words in Swedish to Hellboy. He smiled dumbly, the universal expression used by those who did not want to admit that they had no clue what somebody else was saying. When Abe and the professor had made it down the ladder, Hellboy was relieved.

  Klar and his lackeys were next. Hellboy pulled his goggles off and gave the man a long look. “Give us some space, all right?”

  He was surprised when Klar only nodded.

  “So, am I to understand that no one explained to you what we have found?” Professor Aronsson asked as the snow whipped around them.

  “Great job, huh?” Hellboy asked. “Actually, the Bureau usually provides its field operatives with boatloads of research. In this case, the boss decided we would have a more ‘objective’ investigation if we went in blind.”

  Together they walked toward the corpse. It was not perfectly preserved like some of the ancient specimens that had been found in the previous century. This thing looked mummified, like a dried husk of skin had been draped over the massive skeleton beneath.

  “Objective,” Hellboy repeated. “Who the hell could see this thing and be objective?”

  “If it is real, I would agree with you,” the professor replied.

  “You doubt its authenticity?” Abe asked, moving closer to them.

  Professor Aronsson froze, there on the riverbank. He turned to regard them both, looking first at Abe, then at Hellboy. “How could it be what it appears to be? Do you realize what that would mean?”

  Hellboy shrugged. “I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff. That’s life.”

  He glanced over at Abe, who no longer looked bored, irked, or even cold. They stood perhaps half a dozen feet from the corpse and now Hellboy moved closer. His tail traced a line in the thin layer of snow. Wispy remnants of the dead thing’s hair and beard moved with the wind. Around its neck was an enormous bronze pendant fashioned in the shape of a cruel-looking serpent. The size of the cadaver, its obvious age, that bronze pendant; none of it would have stirred within Hellboy a fraction of the fascination he felt at the moment were it not for that weapon in its right hand. Gnarled, dead fingers had clutched at its haft for forgotten millennia.

  Hellboy crouched to get a better look at it. Though the handle was short, the head was many times the size of a sledgehammer. It had been forged of a dark metal and etched with some sort of symbolic engraving, twin lines that turned outward and curled in upon themselves. The hammer was not squared, but came to a sort of peak on the top, and had protrusions on either end that would likely have made it more deadly. For this was no workman’s tool, but a war hammer.

  “Has anyone tried to lift it?” Abe asked, shouting to be heard over the wind.

  “You mean have we attempted to remove it?” Aronsson replied. “The weather has prevented us from taking the proper precautions in transporting the remains, but yes, we did try to… remove the hammer.”

  Remove, Hellboy thought. That wasn’t the question. But he could tell from the man’s tone that the professor knew exactly what Abe was really asking.

  “You couldn’t lift it,” he said. It was not a question. Even as he spoke, Hellboy reached out with his left hand. He paused, however, and stared at his own thin red fingers in hesitation. Then he flexed the huge fingers of his right hand, so much stronger and more massive than the other. Withdrawing his left he reached out with that huge right hand and brushed at the fingers clutching the war hammer. He expected them to snap and fall to dust, but they opened like the petals of a flower. Hellboy grasped the handle of the hammer, marveled that the leather wrapped around its length was still intact, did not seem to have rotted at all.

  “You couldn’t lift it?” Hellboy asked, his back to Abe and the professor, blocking their view of what he was doing.

  “Actually, we only tried to lever it out of position to see if… well, to see if it could be moved. It could not. It might as well be rooted to the ground. Of course, no one tried to lift it by hand because of the lightning.”

  Hellboy stood up, the hammer clutched in his hand, huge even in his massive grip. He tested its weight, the feel of it. The hammer was heavy, but not so much that he would have been unable to wield it in battle if he wanted to. He stared at the thing in his hand and a kind of awe swept through him as he wondered if this could really be what they were all thinking it might be. His gaze went past the hammer to the cadaver on the ground, its sunken eyes, its dry, papery skin. If the hammer was for real, then the dead guy would be too. And that was just too wild to even think about, no matter what Hellboy had said to Professor Aronsson.

  Professor Aronsson, he thought. He had just said something about—

  “Lightning?” Hellboy asked, turning to face them. “What about lightning?”

  Abe started to move closer, clearly fascinated that Hellboy had lifted the hammer. But Professor Aronsson had the opposite reaction. Eyes wide behind his goggles, he raised his hands and backed away in horror.

  “No, no,” the stout man said in a panicked voice. “You must put it—”

  A blaze of lightning arced from the sky, its brightness searing his eyes. The air was filled with the acrid burning stench of an electrical fire. It struck the hammer and the charge passed through Hellboy, paralyzed him, sizzled through his body. He felt the hair at the nape of his neck stand up, and his teeth clamped painfully together.

  Through those clenched teeth, he roared in anguish as the handle of the war hammer fused to his hand.

  Chapter Three

  Shattered spires. Smoke from fires. Funeral pyres. That was all that remained of the city now. The master of Himinbjorg had blown a warning on his great horn, Gjall, and the Aesir had awoken to find that the prophesied day had come at last. The ramparts of Bifrost had shattered and the darkling beasts had gathered on the plains of Vigrid just outside the city walls. The hosts of Valhalla marched out to meet them, nearly half a million strong.

  Bodies burning. Waters churning. The river Iving ran red with blood and the soil was saturated with it. The battle had been sown with death, and now the reaper had come. The harvest of both armies lay pale and ravaged, scattered across the plains. Aesir and Einherjar, Nidavellim and Svartalves… and the giants. The largest of their corpses stretched a league, too far to see head from foot. The war had lasted so long that trees grew up thr
ough their guts, leaves blossoming blood-red cast shade over mountains of rotting flesh.

  Now it was near the end of things. The end of all things. Vigrid had been taken, the wolf and the serpent driving the last of the Aesir back to the city walls and then through. They crumbled, great halls fell, and the children of the gods screamed. This final clash of sword and bone was bereft of the honor that had imbued millions of previous conflicts. It would not end with tankards raised high in the halls of Valhalla, but in the venom of Jormungand, in the gnashing jaws of Fenrir, and at last in a cleansing fire that would raze the nine worlds of all traces of what had come before.

  The glory of an age was passing.

  Hammer clutched in his hand, he stood his ground before the palace of his father and would not be driven back again. His coat of mail had been torn away, and he had lost his helmet as well. With torn and bloodied cloth his only armor, he roared in fury that tore his throat ragged.

  “Come, then, nephew!” he shouted in the language of his fathers ancestors. “The world will suffer your presence no longer. “

  Before him was the head of the serpent, as high as the tallest spire, jaws as wide as the fallen rainbow bridge. Its body disappeared into the distance, in some places visible and in others buried beneath the mounds of the dead. Its tongue lashed out and its jaws snapped and the earth trembled as it slid slowly toward him, but its eyes were dead and still, as though it, too, realized that the end was near for all of them.

  He brought the hammer down on the ground and the earth split open, a fissure cracking wide and running out beneath the serpent’s head. Storm clouds spun in on themselves above and seemed to spill into a river of sky that swept away from the city as though chasing the serpents tail. And below, under the serpent’s belly, the earth raced the storm, tearing itself open and swallowing Jormungand in what was now a canyon miles long. The ruins of Asgard and the dead on the fields of Vigrid began spilling into that canyon after it.