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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

What followed was a great rush of dark, cold water, and the feeling that I was being shoved through a soft tube that was about three sizes too small. Someone kept kicking me in the head, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to pass out first from head trauma or suffocation. Finally, my head broke the surface of the water. I sucked in a great, gasping breath. The air smelled like rotten fish and gingivitis, and I immediately started gagging, simultaneously trying to breath and vomit, vomit and breath.

It was oppressively dark, and everything was moving. I knelt on a spongy shoreline, water covering my knees and splashing against my wrists. When I tried to crawl forward, the ground spasmed, throwing me onto my face and filling my mouth with an intriguing broth of stomach bile, lake water, and something that could only be described as insufficiently digested fish parts. I leapt to my feet, but that led to me banging into the low ceiling, which, just like everything else here, was slightly warm, soft, and shivering at my touch. I flinched back, only to stumble headlong into Chesa. I knew it was Chesa because of the disgusted sound she made when we touched.

“Oh, God, where the hell are we?” I asked around a mouthful of fishy roux. I spat a few times, rubbed my lips against the raspy chain sleeve of my armor, then tried again. “Is this seriously the belly of a whale?”

“Got it in one.” Matthew’s voice came from somewhere to my left. “I’m going to try a light. I’m not sure what will happen. Our host might not like getting the way it tickles.”

“Forget our host, we might not like what we see,” Bethany mumbled. “Maybe the dark is better.”

“The dark is definitely not better,” I said. Just then, the fish lurched forward, sending us all to the moist ground. A brick of something as soft as cheese and as fragrant as rotting garbage squished between my fingers, working its way into my armor.

With a hiss and a crackle, a spark of light appeared in Matthew’s hands. The saint sat huddled near the front of the belly, with Gregory at his side, and Bethany beside him. The three of them looked to have gotten the worst of the drenching. Streamers of seaweed hung from Bethany’s hundred knives, and Gregory looked like he had been strained through a film of dripping green muck. Tembo stood hunched on the opposite end of the belly, peering distastefully at the puckered exit. Chesa and I were in the middle, standing in what I now saw was a pile of putrefying fish that had gotten caught in a fold of the creature’s stomach lining. Chesa yelped and stepped quickly out of the filth. Unfortunately, she took the last scrap of clean real estate, and I was forced to stay in place.

Only Percy seemed unfazed by our predicament. He sat placidly near the ignominious exit, hands folded comfortably in his lap, waiting for all this to blow over. I envied his calm, if not his complexion.

“So what do we do now? How does this damned thing know where to go?” Chesa asked.

“Matthew’s the expert in these matters,” Tembo said, his examination of the exit complete. “You say you’ve had experience with this manner of conveyance?”

“Not personally. Sushi is about as close as I’ve come,” Matthew answered. “But it’s a well-documented trick. I think we just have to sit back and let it do its thing.” He looked appraisingly around the fish’s interior. “I really thought it would be roomier. Not made for high-occupancy travel, I suppose.”

“Roomier? I’d settle for cleaner, and less . . . ” I gestured hopelessly. “Less the inside of a fish.”

“All of our transports have one thing in common,” Chesa said. “They smell terrible. I keep hoping we’ll hitch a ride on a golden chariot, or fly a Pegasus. But this is ridiculous.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “At least it can’t get much worse.”

A rush of wind blew through the stomach, closely followed by a wall of frigid water. Those unfortunate enough to be sitting down were immediately submerged, while the rest of us struggled to keep our heads above water. I caught sight of Bethany spinning head over heels in the middle of the room, and grabbed her by the knife strap. Tembo crashed into me, and the three of us joined the currents, slapping against the fleshy walls and bouncing off one another like pinballs. The torrent swirled around us for several seconds, before rushing out the way it had come.

I lay on my back in the same pile of putrefying fish, which had somehow survived the flood unmoved. Bethany squatted beside me. I scrambled to my feet and did a quick head count. Everyone was still here, though in various states of disarray and general poor spirits. But we were no longer alone.

The bilious tsunami had brought with it hundreds and thousands of tiny prawn, each about the size of my little finger. They lay in a thick carpet over everything, chittering anxiously and crunching underfoot anytime one of us moved. The tiny bugs were tangled in our hair, in our clothes, were scrambling into the cracks of my armor . . . everywhere. It was horrific. Just the smell, which had already been awful, was much, much worse.

“You!” Chesa yelled from across the stomach, pointing at me. “Keep your mouth shut! Not one word!”

“But—”

“Silence!”

I held up my hands in surrender. A prawn, slick with whale mucus, crawled up my middle finger and slowly, deliberately, pinched the tip of my finger.


We rested as well as we could on a carpet of dying prawn in the belly of a fish that was somehow magically whisking us northward. I had no idea what waterways we were following, or if we were still inside Mundane Actual, doing short laps around the lake while Esther devised a plan to extract us from our fishy prison. My only indication that this wasn’t the case was the fact that every once in a while Percy would sniff the air and announce that we were getting closer. I hoped so. It felt like we were huddled together in a slowly collapsing tent made of damp lunch meat.

Our journey ended abruptly, but no more pleasantly than the rest of our time in the belly of this particular whale. I was just discussing the finer points of getting rotten fish out of your hair with Chesa when the ground beneath our feet lurched, and we were expelled, prawn, bile, and all. I landed with a thump on a pebble beach, the grit and grime forcing its way into my armor and clogging my nose. Dragging myself through cold, shallow water, I crawled until I reached dry land and collapsed. The sounds of misery and struggle surrounded me, not the least of which came from Gregory, who seemed to have brought a good deal of the whale’s intestines with him. I lay panting on the shore. When I looked up, it was directly into the barrel of a shotgun.

“Typical,” I said, though between the water pouring from my mouth and the reflexive gagging of my throat, I’m not sure it came out clearly. The bearer of the shotgun certainly misinterpreted my statement as a threat, because I heard the clear sound of a shell being cycled, and the barrel pressed closer to my head.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking these things don’t work on you. That you’re special. Well I’m special, too, and so’s this gun. Odin blessed, and loaded with the bones of saints who should have known better than to come to Norway. So before you do anything clever, I want you to think about it real careful. Understand?”

I squinted up the length of the barrel. The bearer, a stocky woman in her fifties with a halo of blond-white hair held in place with a cord of braided leather, held the gun unwavering in my face. She was dressed in a faded plaid shirt and workman’s slacks, the thighs stained with dirt and grime. Her eyes were pale blue, the color of glacial ice, and just as cold.

“Do you talk, or do you just stare at every beautiful woman you see?” she asked.

“He talks,” Chesa said, standing slowly from a pool of muck. “But once he starts, you’re going to wish he didn’t.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” I said. “I’m a perfectly reasonable conversationalist.”

“Perfectly reasonable folks don’t use the word ‘conversationalist,’” the valkyrie said, because that’s obviously what she was. “Now. It ain’t everyday that old Jonah comes to visit, and it’s less everyday that he brings a pack of heroes in his gullet. So who the Sam Hill are you, and what the Sam Hill are you doing in my lake?”

We had all gotten to our feet by now. Even though there were seven of us, and we were clearly armed, the valkyrie seemed not in the least intimidated.

“That’s no way to greet visitors,” Tembo said carefully. “We mean you no harm.”

“Well, we have this thing called Midwest Nice, so I’ll just apologize for the shotgun, wait I’ll have to ask you to explain yourself.” She shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Look, lady, there are seven of us and one of you,” Gregory said. He hooked his thumbs into his belt. “And even if you’re telling the truth about that shotgun—”

“Two,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“Two of us. Sorry.”

The trees nearby shivered, and a dog the size of a horse poked its head from between the branches. It was some kind of elkhound, with perky ears and a pink tongue, and a face like a fox. It looked at us with friendly eyes.

“Magnus is a good boy,” the valkyrie said.

“Yes, yes he is,” I said carefully. “A very good boy.”

“So, again, who are you, and why are you here?”

“We’re friends of Esther MacRae,” I said. “She sent us to find you.”

“Esther MacRae doesn’t have a lot of friends. She has soldiers, and she has enemies.” The shotgun swept over us before settling on Percy. The valkyrie’s face grew hard. Which was quite a feat, because I thought it was already hard enough to bend steel. Turns out there were hidden depths to this woman’s grimness. “And you come here with one of these monsters. You should have left him in the whale.”

“Whatever happened to civility?” Percy mused. “Was a time you could count on an offer of biscuits and a decent kettle when you met someone new. Nowadays it’s all ‘Leave that one in the whale’ and ‘Who here smells like death?’ It’s hardly proper.”

“Madam, we are here on urgent business,” Tembo said, interposing himself between the shotgun and the zombie. “There has been a breach in Valhalla. The Totenschreck has been stolen. We have been sent by Knight Watch to retrieve the Tears of Freya, to ensure their safety.”

“Oh have ya now?”

“We have,” Gregory said, trying his best hero’s smile.

“Well, that’s a darn shame, that is. Lillie and I, we got rid of those fool Tears a long time ago. Too much trouble, what with the wolves following us home every night, and the little pixies scaring the guests.”

“You . . . got rid of them?” I asked.

“Yeah. Poured ’em down the drain, along with about a gallon of Liquid-Plumr. Good riddance. Too bad you came all this way for nothing.” She slung the shotgun over her shoulder, then picked up a fishing pole that had been leaning against a nearby tree. “Well, you’ve got a heck of a walk ahead of you. Won’t do to send you off without some sandwiches. Come on back to the house. We’ll fix you right up.”


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Framed