Spellcrash Read Free Page A

place to hang out for any length of time. Shall we move this elsewhere?”

    “Good point,” I said. “It’s always harder to hit a moving target. How about we start by introducing Brer Wolf around? I suspect that if we don’t do it now, we’re going to get way too busy with other issues.”

    There were a million things I needed to be doing, starting with finding out what had happened to Necessity and how we’d ended up in the Norse MythOS, and moving right along to finding out what the hell Cerice and Shara were thinking. But just for today, I was going to play hooky from responsibility.

    “Did you have anyone in mind?” asked Melchior.

    I was about to answer when I felt a squeeze on my ankle. I glanced down. A severed hand clung there. Laginn.

    “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to forget you. We’ll introduce you around, too.” Laginn used to be the hand of the Norse God of War, Tyr. That was before Fenris bit the hand off and a few hundred years of marinating in the Norse-style chaos that lives in the giant wolf’s belly gave it new life. Now, it is a he , as well as Fenris’s constant companion and occasional chew toy. They have a strange, semisymbiotic relationship. Which I suppose could be said of me and Melchior as well.

    “Introduce us around?” Fenris canted his head to one side, managing to look simultaneously confused and hungry. “Why?”

    “Well, I figure it’s my fault that you’re stuck here in the land of the Greek gods. That makes it my responsibility to help you get settled. You’re welcome to stay at Raven House for as long as you like, but that’s a pretty isolated corner of reality. I’m sure you’d like to make some friends beyond yours truly and find a better place to hang your”—I tried to think of a suitable substitute for hat —“collar?”

    “I hate that word; you should watch . . .” The huge wolf stopped and made a series of slow turns, looking rather like a dog chasing his tail at one-tenth speed. “Gleipner really is gone, isn’t it? I don’t think I fully understood what that means until this very second.” Fenris threw his great head back and let out a howl that probably terrified everything remotely edible within a ten-mile radius. “I’m free !”

    Then he actually did start chasing his tail. Just when that looked like it might be starting to lose its appeal, Laginn bolted past, running on tippy-fingers. Fenris leaped in pursuit, barking like a puppy the whole time.

    I couldn’t help grinning as the two dodged in and out among the weird detritus that dotted the surreal landscape. The worlds out at the edge of the Greek MythOS can get very strange, and Garbage Faerie is one of the oddest I’ve ever visited.

    It looks rather like what you might get if a high urban civilization turned over a hundred years of its trash and junk flow to a really twisted designer of Japanese formal gardens. Big-screen TVs lie cracked screen up, with delicate arrangements of pebbles tracing the fractures. Old train engines have been planted like the menhirs of Stonehenge, their original shapes all but obscured by the wild grape and morning glory that grow on them. It is beautiful and bizarre and I love it.

    The exuberant game of chase played between a wolf roughly the size and shape of an anorexic Clydesdale and the bitten-off hand of a god made it all the stranger and more wonderful. I laughed aloud for the sheer weirdness of existence. Fenris was a power, too, or had been in his home MythOS. Here, he would be much weaker but also free. Free of the mantle of a power and free of the silver cord of Gleipner the Entangler, which had bound him for more than a thousand years. What would it be like to shake all that off?

    I was feeling pretty good about that and my whole Big Fat Norse Odyssey up until Laginn leaped over the edge of the large and very fresh crater that dominated the scenery, and Fenris followed him down. That was when my smile died. The giant hole in the