Hammered

the north, since I was returning a few miles to the south to avoid running into just such a party. They knew the Norns were missing, and perhaps they knew about Ratatosk as well; now they were following the trail I’d left them. At least I knew they wouldn’t be waiting for me at Yggdrasil.
    Yet a whisper of thunder behind me caused me to risk a look. The sound suggested a mass of cavalry, but instead it was only a single horse on the horizon. It was a massive horse, the height of a camel rather than any thoroughbred, and it had eight legs rather than the four I was accustomed to seeing. It was Sleipnir, the steed of Odin, and on its back rode the one-eyed god, spear in hand. Above the horizon, twelve flying horses galloped in the air, each bearing an armored maiden with shield and sword. They were Valkyries, which meant the shit I was in was deeper than the Mariana Trench. They were the Choosers of the Slain on this plane, the Norse equivalent of the Morrigan except with funny winged helmets, and somehow I didn’t think they would choose Odin to die.
    I turned tail and ran for it. Cool, a chase scene, I thought manically as I huffed around the apple in my lips. If I’d brought my iPod, I could have loaded in Wagner’s » Ride of the Valkyries « for the soundtrack. Though, on reflection, it was dreary stuff and wouldn’t lend me any speed. Perhaps it would have been more amusing and inspirational to play something culturally jarring and utterly absurd, like Jerry Reed’s banjo anthem for those seventies bootlegging movies; Odin and the Valkyries could play the role of Smokey, and I’d be the legendary Bandit. Odin looked a bit more competent than Sheriff Buford T. Justice, unfortunately, and I wasn’t exactly moving like a 1977 Trans Am. The rumble of Sleipnir’s hooves was growing steadily louder; he was gaining on me.
    Odin’s spear, Gungnir, was a neat piece of magic like Moralltach or Fragarach. Thanks to the runes carved on its head, it was always supposed to hit its target, and its target always died. That sort of magic tended to work; I had firsthand experience, using both Fragarach and Moralltach. I wondered, though, what kind of range he had. Did the magic work in such a way that he could simply target me, then give the spear a halfhearted throw in my general direction and let the runes do the rest? Or did he have to be within the range of his natural (albeit godlike) strength to chuck it after me? It was times like this when I wished I had a parietal eye.
    The blowing of a war horn forced me to look around. Valkyries don’t blow war horns for the fun of it; they do so only with a purpose, as a signal in battle. I was in time to see Odin, still more than a quarter mile away, rise from his saddle and hurl Gungnir up into a high arc, the terminus of which was undoubtedly intended to be my heart or brain. At the same time, the Valkyries surged behind it, raising their swords and then pointing them all at me. My cold iron amulet sprouted frost crystals and trembled on my chest, and I knew that they had just chosen me to die. I suppose I could have depended on my amulet to protect me from their death sentence, but I’m too paranoid to leave everything up to a hunk of metal when I have options. What if the amulet didn’t affect the targeting until the spear hit my aura? I couldn’t let the spear get within a couple of inches of my skin and then try to dodge. I wanted to try out something else.
    My idea was to shake off both Gungnir’s targeting and the Valkyries’ doom by changing the nature of the target. I bounded for a couple of leaps to the right to avoid the path of the spear and then did three things in less than a second: I dissolved my camouflage, changed back into human form, and stopped running. The apple popped out of my human lips and I caught it in my left hand. It was covered in deer slobber but otherwise unmarred.
    The stag that Gungnir had been sent to kill wasn’t there anymore, and I heard the spear whistle over my head before my eyes caught up to see it thud menacingly into the moor some forty yards along my previous path. I checked on my pursuit and saw Odin and the Valkyries pull up to make sure they weren’t hallucinating.
    They couldn’t believe their eyes. The spear that never missed had just missed. The chosen slain wasn’t slain but prancing around naked in the Plain of Idavoll with an apple in his hand and a defiant grin on his face. As they watched, the red-haired