Hammered

meant I had to move on quickly if I wanted to live through it.
    I hefted the spear in my left hand, deciding to hold it in reserve. Perhaps the ideal moment to use it would present itself. In the meantime, the Æsir wouldn’t be able to pick it up without dealing with me first.
    Unfortunately, picking it up proved to be their plan precisely. Leif’s shouted warning saved me. I jumped frantically to my right and barely avoided Thor’s hammer, which fell from the hand of the thunder god, directly above. The earth shook with his blow and toppled our entire party to the ground, and a white splash of snow exploded from the impact, stinging me as I landed nearby. Before I could gather my arms and legs together, Thor was already back on his feet in the small crater he’d made. He had a new shield, I saw, and a new outfit of armor that indicated he was taking us a bit more seriously. The mail shirt was still there underneath, but he had a sleeveless tunic of lamellar armor over it now, made of red-dyed hardened leather. His bracers and greaves were also hardened leather, albeit the normal brown color, and he had nothing of substance over his thighs save for a mail skirt. He wore a cap helmet with a nose guard, but no ridiculous wings or horns sprouted out from the sides of it. His blue eyes blazed from underneath as they locked on mine.
    » Vengeance for the slain! « he cried in Old Norse, and then he charged, hammer cocked to pound my brains to tapioca.
    » Yeah, that’s what this is all about, « I said, scrambling backward in a graceless crabwalk. All I could hope for was to get out of the way again; there was no question of parrying or striking back when I was so off balance, and parrying a war hammer is damn near impossible in the best of situations. My situation—lying naked on my back in the snow—was therefore less than optimal.
    The fire in Thor’s eyes cooled a smidge as he realized this wasn’t a one-on-one duel: He was now in a free-for-all. He took his eyes off me and raised his shield in time to get bowled over by Leif. They tumbled past me in the snow, the vampire hissing and the thunder god roaring, and that gave me enough time to gain my feet and worry about who else might be on the way. Gunnar was coming hell-bent for Thor, and so was Zhang Guo Lao. So eager were they to pile on that they didn’t see what was coming hell-bent for them. The Æsir had flown through the frost giants’ curtain of snow, and now they had all picked a target. » Behind you! « I shouted, hoping they would realize I was speaking to them both, but only Zhang Guo Lao took heed. He turned and set himself, an iron rod in each hand, and neatly redirected the attack of Týr, who leapt at him from the back of his winged horse. Týr was armored in a similar fashion to Thor, except the leather of his lamellar tunic had been dyed blue. He was fighting left-handed, of course, shield mounted on the stump of his right arm.
    Gunnar took a boar tusk in the gut. Gullinbursti gored him from behind, the great tusk sweeping under the werewolf’s hind legs and catching him in the soft underbelly. Gunnar yelped as he was tossed high into the air, blood and maybe intestines trailing beneath him. The sheer wattage output from the dwarf-made boar was blinding with my night vision on, but the silhouetted figure on its back could be none other than the god Freyr. He was raising a sword to cut through Gunnar as he fell back to earth. I’d been hoping to sit out this part of the battle, in the faint hope that nonparticipation would ward off whatever bad karma would accrue here; the words of Jesus and the Morrigan still rang in my ears. But I couldn’t stand by and let Freyr chop Gunnar in two.
    I’m not much of a lefty, but the distance was short and either the runes would work or they wouldn’t: I hurled Odin’s spear as quickly as I could toward the god and hoped it would be in time. It caught Freyr under the arm and threw him off the back of Gullinbursti, as his sword cut shallowly into Gunnar’s flesh on the right side of his rib cage. The werewolf plunged snarling into the snow, not done yet but grievously wounded. The huge golden boar—the size of a conversion van—charged past me, and I raked Fragarach along its right side as it hurtled by, eliciting a startled scream from it. It struggled to slow its rush and pivot around to make another pass, and I took the frantic second this afforded me to check the field.
    Leif and Thor were