The Testament of Loki Page 5

  Evan laughed. “Now you’re being weird. But what the hell.” He wheeled his chair over to the fridge. “Be my guest.” I noticed then that there was something about his eyes. They seemed slightly out of alignment, as if looking in different directions.

  Stop it, said Jumps. He’s got a glass eye. No big deal. Stop staring. And don’t mention the wheelchair, all right? He must be having one of his bad days.

  Bad days. I sensed a reference to something in their shared past. If it was relevant to my needs, I guessed she’d fill me in soon enough. I shrugged and began to go through the fridge’s contents. I recognized some items and sampled a few unfamiliar ones. Evan watched me from his chair, quizzical but smiling.

  “Why don’t you stand up?” I said, through a mouthful of cold apple pie.

  Jumps had a quiet tantrum in her corner of our shared space. Whether this was at my question or the eating of the pie I was as yet uncertain.

  Evan grinned. “Okay, who the hell are you,” he said. “And what have you done with the real Jumps?”

  10.

  Thank the gods. He understands. It seemed almost too much to hope for the human to have grasped the situation so clearly. But Jumps had a lot of respect for him, a sentiment that bordered on worship. I understood that Evan was smart, possibly almost as smart as me.

  I looked at him. He was grinning.

  “I am Loki, the Trickster,” I said. “Son of Farbauti and Laufey. You may know me from legends, tales, or such games as Asgard!™.”

  Evan kept on grinning. “Go on.”

  “I have entered the corporeal presence of the one you call Jumps, through a tributary of Dream. As a result, she and I now share the same physical Aspect, although our minds coexist independently. Also, you should probably know that I have sworn to liberate my companions from their current torment, after which we shall, verily, feast with my brothers in Valhalla. Forsooth.” (I added that last part to add gravitas to my little speech, and because Jumps appeared to think that was how a real god of Asgard was supposed to talk.)

  Evan laughed. “Sounds like a great idea for an RPG,” he said. “So what’s the punch line?”

  “The what?” I said.

  He doesn’t believe you, dummy, said Jumps. And what’s with the verily, forsooth?

  “I thought that was what you wanted,” I said.

  What, are you crazy? said Jumps.

  “You mean he doesn’t believe me?”

  Of course he doesn’t believe you, Jumps said. You’re telling him his best friend has been taken over by a Norse god, and you’re expecting him to say “Forsooth, let’s unto the realms of Death, thereby to liberate my kinsmen”?

  Well, that had kind of been the plan. I’ll admit I was a little disappointed.

  Evan was still watching me with an expectant look on his face. “Good game,” he said. “Shall I be Thor?”

  “I’d so much rather you didn’t,” I said.

  “Oh for god’s sake, let me explain,” said Jumps, taking control of the voice part once more, while I turned my attention back to the fridge. The physical demands of this body were many, and given that Jumps didn’t seem to care, I felt it was up to me to address the current breakfast deficiency. There was something cold that Jumps called “pizza,” which I sensed was forbidden. I therefore made a grab for it, and found it delicious.

  The dog, which had been faking sleep, started to take an interest and ambled over to see if there was anything going begging. It was the most stupid-looking dog I’d ever seen: white and fluffy, with the longest tongue outside of Netherworld. I dropped the dog a piece of crust and it cavorted joyfully.

  “So,” Jumps was saying, “either I’m nuts and my life is over, or maybe you, like, spiked my drink with acid, or something, in which case, I won’t get mad, but please, please tell me now, because this isn’t funny at all!”

  Oh, great. Now she was crying. Plus she was talking so fast that I could barely swallow my pizza. I said, “Do you mind? I’m eating.”

  “Fuck off!” said Jumps, and spat out my mouthful of pizza onto the kitchen floor. The dog obligingly cleaned it up.

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Evan said, “Okay. Sit down. Stop shouting. Step away from the fucking pizza.”

  He sounded calm enough, so I did. Besides, it was hard to enjoy a meal with Jumps running riot in my space. She trusted Evan, in spite of the fact that she knew he wasn’t trustworthy. Underneath, she trusted him. I could see it in her thoughts. It occurred to me that I’d once had a relationship very like this. It didn’t end well, of course (none of them did), but people are like that. Ridiculous.

  “Okay,” said Evan when Jumps and I were both sitting down beside him. His metal chair made little ticking sounds as he rocked it gently to and fro as Jumps retold her story. “Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?”

  “I was playing Asgard!™,” said Jumps in a shaky little voice.

  Evan gave her a look.

  “I know. You were going to show me how. But I was bored, and you weren’t answering your messages. I thought I’d just try a level or two. I didn’t think it could do any harm. And then, suddenly, he was there, inside my head. Talking to me. Eating for two. Going through my memories.” She looked at Evan, who was sitting forward in his metal chair, apparently fascinated. “Just please, tell me you did something,” she said. “I won’t mind. I’ll understand. I just don’t want this to be real.”

  Wait, I said. Did he actually warn you that this kind of thing might happen?

  No, well, not exactly, said Jumps. But—

  Evan leaned forward. “Did he speak? Did he say something just then?”

  “Yes. He talks to me all the time,” said Jumps, taking a cushion from the couch and hugging it tightly to her chest. “I’ve tried to just ignore him. But you don’t know what it’s like. It’s like—”

  I spoke aloud. “Oh please. Don’t play the victim card. Remember, I’m the victim here. In fact, the Oracle’s Prophecy deals with that most poignantly.” I quoted:

  “ ‘I see one bound beneath the court,

  Under the Cauldron of Rivers.

  The wretch looks like Loki.’ ”

  I spread my hands. “ ‘Now that,’ ” I said, “ ‘is tragedy.’ ”

  Evan smiled. “You’re good,” he said. His glass eye watched me unblinkingly. The living one burned with blue fire.

  Jumps began to cry again. “It’s not a prank. I swear it’s not.” I caught the glimpse of a memory—something from school, something childish, dwarfed by her current horror and fear. Evan was prone to playing pranks. I took it that he and Jumps had been involved in some kind of incident. She had been angry enough at the time to want to pay him back in some way.

  But Evan was looking curious. “Is he there all the time?” he said. “What does it feel like? Did it happen all at once, or gradually?”

  Jumps gave a watery sniff. “At first I thought it was kind of cool. But that’s because I didn’t quite believe it was real. It was like a game. But now it’s real. Now it’s real, and I want it to stop—”

  “Hang on, please.” I was starting to feel really quite uncomfortable. Not to mention hurt—as if it wasn’t bad enough to be condemned to Netherworld, the moment I managed to find my way into a suitable host, I was treated like an intruder.

  But you are an intruder! wailed Jumps in my mind. And it isn’t even your mind, it’s mine!

  I had to admit she had a point. But even so, her reaction seemed unnecessarily violent. “It’s always been like this,” I said. “No one ever gave me a chance. Not in Asgard, not in Dream, nor anywhere in the Middle Worlds. What harm have I done you? None at all. I could have driven you out of your mind, and taken over your Aspect. But I didn’t. That would have been wrong.”

  “You thought about it,” said Jumps. “I could tell.”

  “So shoot me. Thinking isn’t a crime.”

  I turned to Evan, who was still watching us both with a look of fascinati
on. “You look like a reasonable man. Tell me, what other choice did I have? I saw a line. I grabbed it. And honestly, if I’d had the choice, I wouldn’t have chosen to enter the body of a teenage girl with a fucking eating disorder.”

  I realized that I’d grabbed those words from Jumps’s inner lexicon. Their meaning followed soon after in a burst of feelings and memories: images of childhood, pictures of fashion magazines, her mother drinking herbal tea, some numbers on a bathroom scale, the Stella person again, and then that chant that seemed to resurface every time she was feeling low: Land whale, land whale—

  “I’m sorry,” I said. (Where in the Worlds had that come from?) “I didn’t mean to say that.”

  Now you’re apologizing? said Jumps. How about you just leave?

  I sighed. “You see? Whatever I do, it always comes down to this in the end. Get Loki. He doesn’t belong. He isn’t one of us. He’s a freak. Don’t trust the freak. Someone dies? Blame the freak. Lock the freak in a dungeon and hang a giant snake in his face.”

  “There were reasons for that,” Evan said.

  “Whatever,” I told him. “It’s in the past. Can’t we move on?”

  Evan started to laugh. There was something familiar about that laugh, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Something from a long time ago. Something from another life.

  I flicked through the Book of Faces. Evan. Best friend since childhood. Genius RPG player. Favourite colour: arterial red. Favourite movie: Tampopo. Favourite novel: Les Misérables. Favourite meal: chili pizza, with pineapple and extra jalapeños.

  Not much there, I told myself, although the pizza sounded good. I moved a little closer, trying to see him clearly. He looked pretty ordinary to me, except for that metal chair of his. Brown hair, no beard, a clever, open, humorous face. Nothing there to recognize, except for the fire in his one living eye. And yet I felt that I knew him, somehow. That somehow, I’d always known him.

  “You’d better not be who I think you are,” I said.

  He grinned. “I’m disappointed. After all we’ve been through together, I thought you’d have known me, Captain.”

  I sat down, rather hard, on one of the vinyl kitchen chairs. I should have known, I told myself. I should have known him by his smile, rare in those days of Asgard, and by his laughter, rarer still, and so often the sign of trouble. Or by his one blue eye, so sharp that it seemed to pierce right through me. And he had called me Captain. No one ever called me that. No one since the End of the Worlds. And that’s how I knew, beyond a doubt—

  Odin was in Evan.

  Light

  An absolute only serves to affirm the reality of its opposite.

  The moment your god said, “Let there be light,”

  He created the darkness.

  (Lokabrenna, 9:18)

  1.

  I had to laugh. That Odin of the Aesir, Founder of Worlds, Master of Runes, Chronicler of the Elder Age, should be reduced to taking possession of a young man of the Folk, who, by all appearances, couldn’t even walk—

  “Actually, I can walk,” he said. “But only on my good days.” He went on to explain in unnecessary detail the physical condition of his host, his good and bad days, his medication and his more or less constant joint pain, while I mined Jumps’s memories for anything that might give me an edge.

  But Jumps had retreated into a space at the back of her tiny mind, where she was curled up, repeating things like: This isn’t real, and fuck this shit, none of which were helpful to me in my current predicament.

  “How long have you been in this world?” I said.

  “Long enough,” said Odin.

  “And how did you get here?”

  Odin shrugged. “Much as you did, I believe. Via the River Dream, which runs through every World there is, or was, or might one day be possible.” He gave me a smile that might almost have been that of a brother or a friend. “The greatest minds of this World see Reality as a many-branched tree, in which every possible outcome of every possible act is laid out. Sound like anything we know?”

  “Yggdrasil,” I said at once. The World Tree, in whose branches—according to lore—the Nine Worlds were suspended.

  The General smiled. “You’re quick. This World may seem very different to the one we left, and yet we have much in common. So many branches of science that sound suspiciously like our runelore. So many things that intersect. So many common elements.” He gestured around him. “Take this town of Malbry. According to this many-worlds theory, there should be a version of this place—and even its inhabitants—in any number of similar Worlds. Perhaps even in the one we left.”

  “Hmm.” Well, it sounded at least as plausible as the theory I’d been taught, which (without going into unnecessary detail) had involved the whole of Creation coming from a giant cow.

  “There’s lots more,” Odin went on. “Something called ‘quantum theory,’ and something about a cat in a box, which, like the gods, is both dead and alive. Evan has knowledge of all these things, knowledge that he has shared with me.”

  “You don’t say,” I remarked. “Because this is the biggest info dump I’ve heard since Mimir the Wise came back from Vanaheim minus his body.”

  Odin smiled. The Silent One, we used to call him, back in the day. This was the chattiest I’d seen him since he lured me from Chaos. Still, I thought, after Netherworld, perhaps he’d rediscovered the appeal of conversation.

  “All we need to know,” he said, “is that the Worlds have expanded. There are possibilities now that we never envisaged.”

  “Such as?”

  “Going back to our World. Reclaiming our godhood. Finding our friends.”

  I had to laugh at that. “Our friends? Wait a minute, would they be the guys who slaughtered my sons, then hunted me down, imprisoned me—”

  “Bygones,” said Odin. “You swore an oath.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “But if, by definition, every possibility exists on some branch or other of the Tree, then maybe this reality is the one in which I break my oath, and go on to live a rich and happy life on a tropical island somewhere?”

  Odin shook his head. “No.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because,” he said, “I have a plan.”

  Of course. When did the General not have a plan? “And presumably, this plan of yours involves us living happily in our current Aspects, without going out of our way to encounter—shall we say—giant snakes, or the Lords of Chaos, or anything equally likely to upset our equilibrium?”

  “Not as such,” said Odin.

  “Oh? So what happens?”

  “We die,” he said. “Or maybe not.”

  I said, “Well that’s a weight off my mind.”

  He grinned. Even in this unfamiliar Aspect I would have known that grin anywhere. It was the one that the General always wore when the chips were down—the smile of a gambler about to play the last coin in his pocket.

  “Think of this world, this body,” he said, “as the box in which that cat lingers, neither wholly dead nor alive. If this works, the cat walks free. We get the chance to start again.”

  “And what if the cat’s already dead?” I said. To be honest, all this stuff about cats was starting to get my goat.

  Odin—or was it Evan?—shrugged. “If it’s dead, it’s dead,” he said. “In either case, the cat can’t stay in the box forever. You and I were never meant to live in such a small space as this.”

  I thought about that. He did have a point. Living free of torment was a novelty that would fade. Soon, I guessed I’d start to miss the things that made me Loki—my Aspect, my powers, my runes, my glam. Besides, how much longer would Jumps live? Fifty years? Maybe even seventy? And after that, where would I go? Back to Netherworld, or Hel, where I could spend eternity. No, I needed more than that. I needed something more permanent.

  “You think we could go home,” I said. “Is that even possible?”

  He shrugged. “I believe it is. I believe that we
can return to the place where Asgard fell. Back to the source of our power.” He let that sink in for a moment, like a lure into the sea. I could see the fishhooks sticking out at every point, and yet the lure was so shiny that even I was tempted.

  To reset the world like a game board, with all its pieces back in place. To rebuild Asgard, to free the gods, to start again, the past erased, to play out another scenario—

  “So, are you with me, Captain?” said Odin at last.

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “So how’s your wrist?”

  “My wrist?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to play Asgard!™,” said Odin with a brilliant smile. “And this time, we’re not going to stop until my son is here in the flesh.”

  2.

  My son. By which he meant Thor, of course. I sensed a stirring of interest in the mind I shared with my host. Of course, I knew that Jumps would spare no effort to help Wonder Boy. In fact, I wondered how she had managed to end up with me at all.

  The game was played on something Jumps thought of as a console, although what consolation a box filled with cantrips would provide in the face of oblivion was a mystery to me. We sat on either side of the screen, each holding a focus of some sort (Gamepad, corrected Jumps irritably), inscribed with unfamiliar runes. The dog hung hopefully around, making with the tongue again.

  “So, how do we play this game?” I said.

  “You don’t. We do,” said Evan. And there was something in his face—a presence, and maybe an absence, too, that told me I was speaking to the body’s original host, and not its rascally passenger. “You just talk to the Thunderer. Count on us to get him out.”

  “And put him where?” I protested. “It’s bad enough sharing this space with its original occupant. I’m not about to sublet.”

  “Don’t worry.” That was Odin again. I could tell from the gleam in his eyes. A wholly unreliable gleam, promising all kinds of things, with Death at the end of all of them. “You do the talking. I’ll do the rest. I told you, Captain, I have a plan.”