Underworlds #4: The Ice Dragon Read online

  A dragon made of ice.

  His silver armor had become a scaly hide, making him look like a crazy machine — a cross between a robot and a reptile, a prehistoric serpent, a beast made of spikes and jagged scales. His head was enormous, and the gleaming Crystal Rune swung on a silver chain around his neck.

  Lifting a clawed foot high, he stepped under the arch and onto the ramparts leading to the throne.

  “We have to stop him here,” Sydney said. “Jon, your sword —”

  Both swords flashed out as my friends stood side by side, ready to guard me.

  My breath seemed to have stopped. I could barely move my fingers. This was really happening. I plucked the lyre’s second string. It sang across the air and faded.

  Loki roared, a horrible sound that made my insides twist. His horns, normally clawing like creepy fingers, had frozen as sharp as blades. His wings crackled as they stretched from one wall to the other, a full fifty feet or more. I looked down at the little lyre in my hands. It seemed like such a lame weapon now.

  “I claim my throne,” Loki said in a weird, slithery voice as he strode forward. “But please don’t stand aside. Try to prevent me. I shall enjoy the sport of destroying you. And it will be such fun to tell Dana Runson of your last minutes —”

  Before we knew what was happening, Loki lunged at Jon, then swung a claw and tore the lyre from my hands. It flew through the air, struck the icy floor, and crashed into the base of the throne. It must have sent a pain rocketing into my head, because I blurted out the dumbest thing possible before I could stop myself.

  “Give up,” I said.

  Loki laughed. “Are you speaking to me?” he said. “Or to your little friends?”

  With a flick of his tail, he slammed the base of the arch behind him. Strangely, it was suddenly as if we were inside an actual room, rather than being beneath the sky. The sharp noises from the battlefield were muffled and distant.

  “Now we are alone,” Loki said, slowly clawing his way forward. “Every step of the way, you have been there, slowing my progress, clouding my dream.”

  “It was pretty cloudy to begin with,” Sydney said.

  Loki sneered at her. “Hades. Kingu. Anubis. You’ve turned them all against me. You … children! The amusing part is that it only makes my work easier. For now I can defeat all my enemies in a single battle, a battle that ends with my taking Odin’s throne as my own. And, thanks to you, I have the key.”

  “No one but Odin can sit in Odin’s throne,” I said.

  “Except the possessor of the rune,” Loki said, holding it up. “I can read, you know — ‘Whoever holds this crystal key holds close the fate of Odin’s throne.’”

  “Except there’s more,” I said. “‘Come Ragnarok, when all is gone, great Odin’s throne alone shall be.’ That means not even you, Loki. That means nothing at all will survive … except the throne itself.”

  I felt if we could just keep Loki busy long enough, Odin would get there. Or Thor. Or Hades. But the distant battle seemed farther away than ever, and the lyre was now thirty feet away from me, possibly busted, a worthless mess of wood and wire.

  But if we didn’t have the lyre, we didn’t have much. So I had to try to get it, however I could.

  Loki slid one clawed foot forward. In three moves, he could be at the base of the throne. In two more, he could insert the rune into the throne. This was it.

  I glanced at my friends. Sydney was on one side of the room, Jon was in the middle, and I was on the other side. While Loki edged along the wall nearest the courtyard below, I saw my chance.

  Just a little more …

  Come on …

  “Charge him!” I cried.

  “WAIT, WHAT?” SAID SYDNEY.

  “Charge him?” said Jon.

  I was the only one who moved. But maybe that worked for me. As Loki’s dragon head swung around to look at each of us, I raced at him, then faked a lunge with my sword, spun, ducked, and hacked down as hard as I could. The blow on his left front leg rang in my hands as if I had tried to break open a stone. But the thrust was powerful enough to send a shiver through his body. I heard a crackle of ice and pressed all my weight on the sword.

  Sydney and Jon were suddenly with me, thrusting their swords into the same leg. Loki shook himself free and began to slide down the stairs, howling and clutching wildly at us. Sydney tried to pull us back from the edge of the stairs. She would have done it, too, except for the long reach of Loki’s tail. He swept all three of us off the ground and we fell with him — thirty feet to the courtyard below, barely missing Baldur’s body. The stones cracked beneath the dragon’s weight. Jon, Sydney, and I thudded on the floor, hard.

  I don’t know if we passed out or what, but by the time I opened my eyes, Loki was hobbling back toward the stairs, dragging his wounded leg.

  “Jon! Syd!” I called. “We clipped his leg. We can stop him!”

  “Just us?” said Jon, groaning for breath. “Have you looked at us lately, Owen? We’re … nothing! We’re just kids!”

  “That got us this far,” Sydney said. “Come on!”

  Despite his wounded leg and a cracked wing he must have gotten in the fall, Loki dragged himself up the stairs to the level of the throne. We scrambled after him. When we reached the ramparts, Sydney cried, “Owen, watch out!”

  Too late. Loki snapped his tail like a whip and swept me across the floor. Jon jumped over the moving tail, then plunged his sword into Loki’s cracked wing. The dragon screeched and flung his wing forward, sending both Jon and Sydney tumbling into me.

  “I’m going for the lyre!” I called to my friends. “Cover me —”

  Loki swung around, his icy claws slicing.

  Jon narrowly missed getting his head knocked off. I dived over Loki’s coiling tail and slid across the floor toward the lyre. Loki slammed his foot on the lyre, then thrust the Crystal Rune at the throne like a missile shot.

  “No!” I cried. I couldn’t reach the lyre with my hands. The only way to make a sound was to strike the strings with the sword.

  I slammed the sword down.

  Blanngggg! The lyre’s strings snapped.

  Loki arched back suddenly, then stopped.

  Everything stopped.

  In that moment, Loki’s face was twisted to one side. I saw the venom frozen in his eyes. I had stopped time, but my head rang like a bell that Thor was pounding with his hammer. Strangely, my body kept moving. I couldn’t tell you how, but I was up on my legs and jerking the point of my sword up into the ice dragon’s chest.

  My sword blade went up, up, up, as if I were popping a balloon with a toothpick, except the sword was sharp and heavy and real, Loki was no balloon, and my brain was threatening to explode. Up went the blade, and — CRACK! — with the shattering of Loki’s icy hide, time roared back.

  The ice dragon swooped down, and somehow I was against the underside of his chest, pushing the blade upward. Then I felt the pressure of hands pushing on my shoulders and back. Sydney and Jon were behind me, pushing me forward, holding me up.

  Clank! The Crystal Rune dropped to the floor at the foot of Odin’s throne. The sword was deep in Loki’s chest, and I dropped my hands just as ice crystals exploded in my face and scattered across the stone floor.

  When I fell, my sword dropped to the stairs with a clang. I snatched up the broken lyre and the rune in a single grab.

  A howl came from the mound of ice chunks. The dragon was no more, and Loki appeared in its place, screaming and squirming and clutching his chest with both hands.

  “We did it,” I said, watching Loki gasp for breath. “We did it!”

  I pulled Jon and Sydney to their feet. We strode to the high walls. Jon held up Loki’s helmet, and Sydney held the Crystal Rune. I held the lyre together with my hands and plucked one string as loudly as I could. Everything quieted for a moment as all eyes turned toward us.

  In the next instant, Loki’s monsters let loose a wail that reached the sky. Without Loki’s
powerful runic magic binding them to him, they could no longer fight. Odin and the lords and beasts of the Babylonian, Greek, and Egyptian Underworlds quickly circled Loki’s armies in a death grip, pressing them to the shore and back onto their ships.

  Before we knew it, Odin and Thor burst into Valhalla. “Imprison the fiend!” Odin boomed.

  Thor smashed right and left, hammering columns into jagged bars and surrounding the wounded Loki behind them, like a zoo exhibit. Spitting and growling, Loki changed into a dozen different shapes, but no matter how strong or how small, he couldn’t escape his new prison. To make it that much worse, the gods set a viper over the cage to drip its venom on Loki constantly.

  Drip … drip … drip …

  “You will stay there until the real Ragnarok comes,” Odin proclaimed. “Loki, give the order now to release Dana and her parents!”

  Loki gazed up between the bars with glassy, wicked eyes. “Wait for it …”

  “Fenrir has escaped!” cried Miss Hilda, circling overhead on her flying horse.

  “And there it is!” Loki gargled a laugh. “My faithful servant makes his way to Niflheim, to execute one last command!”

  “Dana!” I cried, seeing her face in my mind’s eye. “Odin, we need to get to Niflheim now!”

  I wasn’t a hero. I was just a person with a friend. I had to bring Dana home. I wouldn’t go home without her or her parents. That was all there was to it. I wouldn’t go home. We wouldn’t go home.

  “Odin,” I said, “please —”

  Odin turned to the sea and raised his sword high. With that, Baldur’s longship was dragged to shore. It was a slender boat built entirely of pine, with a single trunk, tall and straight and smooth as iron, as its mast.

  “To go across the Sea of Asgard, beyond the rocks to the land of the dead, there is only one way,” Odin said gravely, pointing to his son’s funeral ship. “That way.”

  JON NARROWED HIS EYES AT ODIN. “SAY THAT AGAIN?”

  But it was all too clear what Odin meant as we joined him, Thor, and the others, carrying Baldur’s body down to the water.

  “We’re going to ride Baldur’s ship to Niflheim,” I said, “because that’s where Dana is.”

  The gods rested Baldur on a platform beneath the mast. Thor laid a shroud on his brother and set the fallen god’s sword and shield over it. The Valkyries piled bread and fruit by his side and stacked firewood around the platform.

  With solemn faces, the gods lowered torches to the firewood. The planks began to smoke and burn.

  Jon seemed to search everyone’s face for a sign that this was some kind of joke. “Is everyone nuts? This may be the mythological world, but that’s real fire,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love sailing. But ride a burning ship? I don’t think so —”

  Even though my legs barely held me up, I walked the plank onto the deck. “I’ll use the lyre to keep the flames away from us,” I said. “We’re going. Dana’s down there. Is everybody ready?”

  Ready or not, Jon and Sydney joined me on deck. With a great heave, Thor and Odin and a dozen others pushed the ship away from shore.

  “You helped us today,” said Odin. “May good fortune and luck be your guides!”

  I would have liked a dozen extra-large gods to be our guides, but I guess when they went to Niflheim it was a one-way journey. As the ship floated free on the water, we quickly squirreled ourselves behind the arched prow, where I began plucking one string of the lyre, then a second, then a third until the flames leaned away from us.

  The waves drew us quickly across the Sea of Asgard toward a range of distant rocks, where there was a narrow pass to the oceans beyond.

  I kept playing the lyre to slow the fire’s progress, and it was working. Even though the flames roared up in a ring around Baldur, his body was untouched. His face, visible above the shroud, appeared as friendly and alive as the first time we saw him.

  And there was a reason for that.

  “A little hot, isn’t it?” Baldur sat straight up, saw the flames, and screamed. “Ahhhhhh!”

  Jon and Sydney screamed, too. “Ahhhhhh!”

  I quickly changed the lyre’s melody, and the flames went out in a puff of gray smoke.

  “What?” I gasped. “Baldur! How?”

  Sydney frowned. “Maybe because it wasn’t Ragnarok, after all? So Baldur couldn’t die?”

  Baldur laughed, then tugged the sprig of mistletoe from his neck, sniffed it, and tossed it overboard. “Well, it’s a good thing you put that fire out,” he said. He noticed that we were approaching the distant rocks, and his face twisted. “Oh. I guess I know where we’re going….”

  The wind picked up, and the waves began to push the ship toward the narrow opening in a range of cliffs that separated the Sea of Asgard from the wide oceans beyond.

  “Hold on,” said Jon, standing at the prow. “The space between those rocks is pretty tight. I might be able to steer us between them. Only please tell me the Norse myths don’t have rocks like the Greek myths do, where they crash together and destroy all the ships going between them. Tell me.”

  Sydney looked up from Dana’s book at Baldur. “Uh …”

  Baldur looked from Sydney to the rocks. “Uh …”

  Jon groaned. “You’re kidding me!”

  The sound of clashing stone was like a thunderclap as the great black cliffs unhinged and struck each other, sending an avalanche of shattered rock into the sea. Before we could do anything to stop them, the rocks pulled apart, and the current sucked our ship toward them.

  “I’ve got it!” Baldur shouted, grabbing hold of the rudder. “Just a twist and a turn and a —”

  Sydney grabbed my arm. “Look there! On the cliffs!” A thin figure dressed in black from head to foot bounded from rock to rock above us. It was clearly a man. He ducked when the waves washed up, and then made his way, ledge by ledge, to the water’s edge.

  “We’ve seen a guy like that before,” said Jon. “It looks like …” His jaw fell open. “Wait a second … the stranger at the museum?”

  “The thief?” said Sydney. “The stranger who’s after the lyre!”

  In a flash it came back to me — the shadowy figure, skulking through the halls of the art museum the night we plotted to steal the Lyre of Orpheus.

  “Hey!” I shouted up at him.

  The man stopped on a ledge. He raised his right hand high. Then he raised his fingers, first four of them, then two, then three, and finally one.

  “Who are you?” I called out. “What do you want?”

  But the man simply repeated what he did with his fingers. Four, two, three, one.

  We lost sight of him as the ship spun forward.

  “Get ready to row!” said Baldur as the prow nosed between the rocks. “If I wasn’t dead before, I may be soon!” I hoped he was just kidding, but we huddled over the oars as he weaved the ship from side to side, slowing its forward motion until the rocks were as far apart as they could be. “And — row!” We plunged the oars into the water and pulled hard. The water threw us between and past the rocks with inches to spare before they crashed together with a deep BOOM.

  “Yeah, Baldur!” whooped Jon.

  But it wasn’t any better on the other side. We bobbed wildly away from Asgard on heaving seas. Over the tops of the waves, we could see plumes of black smoke rising from the distant shorelines in every direction.

  “Your world?” said Baldur.

  “Oh, man. It’s worse than before,” said Sydney. “So many fires.”

  Suddenly, the surface of the sea exploded, and an enormous serpent raised its head.

  “The Midgard Serpent!” Baldur shouted. “Another one of Loki’s ugly children! Jon, hold the rudder with me!”

  The serpent, a huge thing covered with black scales and streaky red spikes, roared and slapped its tail hard, sending a giant wave toward us. Jon jumped to the back of the ship and helped Baldur steer us directly into the wave. The ship spun around and around. Somehow, we lost sight
of the serpent and found ourselves sailing down a familiar coast.

  I don’t know how, but the boat had brought us to Pinewood Bluffs.

  “Whoa!” Jon breathed. “Look at the smoke.”

  I wanted so much to stop, to see my family. But my family wasn’t there. They had gone with everyone else when the town was evacuated.

  And there was no going anywhere but Niflheim. Dana was still missing.

  “There’s Power Island,” said Sydney, pointing up ahead, “where we fought the Cyclopes. One of the entrances to the Norse Underworld is somewhere beneath it, remember?”

  I had no clue how we’d find it, but apparently I didn’t need one. Water suddenly roared high around us, as if we were in the eye of a spinning hurricane. The black sea parted beneath the boat like a trapdoor. We hung in the air for a moment, screaming our lungs out.

  Then we fell.

  “HOLD TIGHT TO — SOMETHING!” I CRIED.

  With the ship in free fall, we jumped on one another like football players in a pileup and clung to the rigging, while Baldur peered over the side. “Uh-oh —”

  “What?” I said.

  WHUMP! The ship hit water hard, then rushed forward like a racing boat.

  “There’s no controlling it now!” Baldur yelled. “Hold on!”

  The ship roared along a white-capped river until we were thrown into another waterway, then another and another. I counted eleven rivers in all, each faster than the one before, until we were dumped into a narrow channel jammed with ice floes.

  “What just happened?” asked Sydney, climbing to her feet and looking a little green.

  “Whatever it was,” said Jon, wobbling next to her, “I hope it never happens again.”

  The boat slowed to a crawl as the icy river narrowed even more.

  “Niflheim,” said Baldur gravely. “The smell of death gives it away.”

  I wasn’t sure what death smelled like, but the air was thick with the odor of something rotting, and barely breathable. Poor Dana. I so wanted to get her out of there.