Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hawke stared suspiciously out of the window of the hotel and across the harbor to the north. After retrieving the axe handle from the newly dispatched Marcus Deprez they had booked into the Hilton Hotel Stockholm Slussen on Guldgränd on the north shore of the island of Södermalm.

Known to Stockholmares simply as “Söder”, it was one of the busiest districts in the whole of Scandinavia. Once a slum, now a gentrified, bohemian quarter full of expensive, minimalist coffee shops and dense traffic, all Hawke knew about the place was that they weren’t safe here.

Deprez was out of the game, having retired permanently from being a bastard back on the south coast of Djurgården, but Álvaro Sala and his chief goon, the hit man from Brussels Leon Smets were still out there somewhere, and now they would be wasting no time searching for the axe handle. It was their only way to reach Thor’s tomb and he was sure a man like Sala wouldn’t give up until he was dead.

Even worse news was Vincent Reno. When the paramedics had arrived he’d been in a bad way and they’d rushed him to Södersjukhuset, a large hospital not far from the museum where he had been shot by Deprez. According to the latest reports he hadn’t regained consciousness on the way to the hospital and was now undergoing an emergency life-saving operation.

According to the paramedics, Ryan had been much luckier than Vincent and the bullet had just missed his humerus. The speeding lead projectile had instead torn through his bicep. It was painful, but some Alvedons and a lot of bandages had reduced the burning sensation and there would be no permanent damage.

“Are you okay, Joe?” Lea asked.

Hawke nodded sullenly.

“What happened to Deprez?” she asked.

“He’s definitely not playing any more,” Hawke said.

“He seemed pretty cut up about it, actually,” Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette. She blew a cloud of smoke out of the window and shook her head in confusion. “Is it obligatory to have a bicycle and a beard in this town, or what?”

“Eh?” Hawke looked up, distracted.

“Nothing, and can we get a sodding balcony next time so I can smoke without setting the buggering alarms off?”

“Yeah, let me make a note,” Lea said. “Because that’s the most important thing we have to think about at the moment.”

“All right, we need to focus,” said Hawke, turning to face the others. He stopped when he saw Scarlet at the drinks cabinet and rolled his eyes. “Really, at this time of the day?”

A gentle clink of ice cubes and a sip of the vodka followed before her response. “I’m on Caribbean time, darling.”

“It is a little early,” Victoria said, a look of serious concern on her face as she glanced at her watch.

Scarlet stared at the woman until she looked away and then took another sip.

“Why is it that you can always find a time-zone to justify it?” Ryan said.

She winked and lit a cigarette. “What can I say? It improves my aim.”

Victoria frowned. “Perhaps a coffee would be more appropriate?”

Scarlet raised an eyebrow but made no reply, restricting her response to another drag on the cigarette before leaning out the window and blowing a second cloud of the hot, blue smoke into the air.

Ryan watched her for a moment and shook his head with a sigh. “You must be responsible for more carbon monoxide pollution than Shanghai.”

“Are you trying to be funny, boy? It’s just that if you are could you signal it in advance so I know when to laugh.”

“I’m surprised you’re not personally named in the Kyoto Protocol.”

“All right, let’s get on,” Hawke said, cracking a much-needed Åbro from the fridge.

“I thought it was too early?” Scarlet said.

“I just went to Caribbean time,” he said with a scowl, and then joined Ryan and Victoria at the desk.

As soon as they had checked into the room Ryan had joined the two halves of Baldr’s axe handle together and began his research into the strange markings. Now, the reformed dropout was doing what he did best, hammering information into a laptop, slowed only by the bandage on his wounded arm.

“What’s the latest?” Hawke asked.

Ryan sighed. “If you place the two halves of the split axe together then what looks like almost meaningless scratches in the wood suddenly becomes a pretty obvious inscription. The glyphs created by joining the fragments are clearly the same strange ancient symbols Dr Donovan had in his research files.”

“And have you worked out what any of it means?” Hawke asked.

“It’s hard to say. Even using the deciphering matrix in Gunnar’s notes and working on what he already translated back in Iceland, it’s far from clear. From what I can make out, it seems to resemble a line from Old Norse poetry. That was always written in Runic inscriptions and was an important way the culture passed stories of their gods to the next generation.”

“Go on.”

“We know much of that old poetry was big on alliteration, and we can see evidence of this here on the axe handle because the same symbols recur at the beginnings of some of the words.”

Lea stared at the carved symbols. “And you can use that to make sense of all this?”

“Yes and no. Old Norse poetry is broken into two categories — the Eddaic and the Skaldic.”

“What makes them different?” Hawke asked.

“The former were always anonymous and rather simple — a bit like Scarlet here — while the latter had an identified author and were generally more complex in their meter. The oldest example of Skaldic can be found on the Karlevi Runestone, a very famous runestone on the island of Öland off the coast of Småland in the south of Sweden.”

“Sorry, could you say that again, Ryan,” Scarlet said, pretending to wake up and yawn. “I nodded off.”

“The point,” Ryan emphasized with a look in Scarlet’s direction, “is that while what I’m looking at here on this axe handle is vaguely redolent of both, it is also clearly neither.”

Hawke sighed. “What about Alex?”

“I emailed her pictures of the reunited axe handle a while ago so now she has everything we have and they’re working on it back on Elysium. So far we’ve come up with a partial translation of the first half of the inscription, which as far as I can tell is a simple reference to Midgard, or Middle Earth.”

Scarlet laughed. “So we’re hunting bloody Orcs now?”

“Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t say no to hunting Hobbits,” she said. “They’re really bloody annoying.”

“We’re not hunting Orcs or Hobbits,” Ryan said. “As I say, Midgard simply means Middle Earth in Swedish. It’s from the Old Norse Miðgarðr if you have to know.”

“I really don’t have to know.”

“Midgard is one of Norse mythology’s nine worlds, and just happens to be the only one that normal, mortal men can actually see because the other eight are all invisible.”

“Oh, great — we’re back to invisibility!”

“So while Thor’s temple is in Uppsala, which is not so far from here, it’s looking like his tomb is in Midgard.”

Hawke nodded, pleased that some progress was being made at last. “And how do we get to this place?”

“According to legend, Midgard is directly above the realm of Niflheim, which means the world of darkness.”

Scarlet sighed. “Sounds really cosy — do go on.”

“Niflheim is one of the two fundamental primordial realms in Norse legend, the other being Muspelheim, the realm of fire. Midgard itself is surrounded by a sea where Jörmungandr, the World Serpent is said to dwell.”

“And why, boy, are you regaling us with this?”

“Because Jörmungandr is the serpent that killed Thor, or will kill Thor to be exact but I don’t want to get into that because it might make your brain explode, Cairo. The fact is that after Jörmungandr emerges from the ocean and poisons the sky, he and Thor fight and Thor kills him, but not before the serpent injects its venom into Thor. Thor then takes nine paces and dies, and that is where he’s buried, of course. I’m all about the tombs, baby.”

“It’s all sounding like a nightmare,” Victoria said. “As a trained archaeologist I can hardly believe what I’m actually hearing.”

Hawke smiled. “We need a location, mate.”

Ryan looked at Hawke and pushed the glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “If it’s Midgard, then we’re talking somewhere in Lapland, without a doubt.”

Hawke nodded. “That’s vague, but better than nothing.”

“A bit like Ryan himself,” Scarlet said quietly.

Ryan lifted his head and looked at Scarlet but all he could see was her hand draped over the back of the leather sofa. “It’s not as easy as you looking for a shag, Cairo. This takes time and intelligence.”

“No one calls me Cairo any more.”

“I’m sure no one calls you anymore full-stop, but that’s another story.”

“Oh, the kitten has claws.”

“Do they always fight like this?” Victoria said.

“Pack it in you two,” Lea said.

“All right,” Hawke said. “Get Alex on Skype and let’s see if she has anything new.”

Ryan made the call while Scarlet swooped on the minibar and cracked open some more Swedish vodka. She took it neat and fast to the horror of Victoria Hamilton-Talbot who, after an admonishing glance at her Cartier wristwatch, had opted for a cup of tea instead.

Moments later they were looking at Alex on the screen.

“Any news?” Lea asked.

“Oh yeah,” the American said with confidence.

Hawke thought she looked distracted, and his mind immediately leaped to what she had said about her legs. He had seen one man die in the most horrible of ways after consuming the elixir, and now he had more concerns after seeing the remains of the dead man in the Pyrenees Mountains. To say he was worried about having given it to Alex to help her legs was an understatement. They had run tests on it in the lab, but its properties still eluded them. Yes, it had brought Lea back to life in Ethiopia, so Alex had been brave, and had taken a tiny, almost homeopathic quantity of the water. Days later she had begun to feel sensation in her legs again, but then she had started to complain of pain in them.

“Are you okay, Alex?” he asked.

On the tiny screen, she casually shrugged her shoulders. “Sure, why not?”

“Just asking. Go on.”

“I think I might have cracked the inscription.”

“This is amazing news!” Lea said.

“It wasn’t particularly hard, actually. As you probably know we already worked out the Midgard bit, but there’s much more. The symbols are hard to make out, but when we cleaned them up a tad it was much easier. I started with the symbol that resembles the Norse Rune for earth and then I got to thinking if the familiarity this symbol shares with the Rune for journey, it might indicate a tunnel.”

Ryan looked at everyone earnestly. “I was literally about to work that out myself as well.”

“Sure you were,” Lea said.

“I was!”

“If you say so,” Scarlet said. “Anything else, Alex?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. This symbol here is almost identical to the Runic script for lake. I was thinking we’re looking for an underground system near a lake somewhere, and that’s when I worked out the last two symbols — one was for a cauldron and the other for the crest of a hill.”

“Excellent,” Scarlet said. “I’ll tell the pilot to fly to a hill crest near a lake with a cauldron on the top of it, somewhere near Mordor.”

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Let her have it, Alex, please.”

“Sure,” Alex said, laughing. “I searched references to cauldrons and hill-crests and it wasn’t long before I found what I was looking for — Kebnekaise.”

A look of recognition dawned on Victoria’s face, but Lea spoke next. “Which is?”

“The highest mountain in Sweden,” Alex replied. “It means cauldron crest in Sami, the language of the Sami people in Lapland. If you ask me — and you did — then I’m saying go to the lake at the base of Kebnekaise and start looking for a tunnel.”

“That’s great work, Alex,” Scarlet said, turning to face Ryan. “Now I know why you’re on the team.”

Ryan got up from his chair and cracked open a beer. “If I’m so useless,” he said, “how come I’m the only one who’s thought about Ragnarök.”

“Ragna-what?”

“The great battle at the end of the world that kills all the gods, including Thor.”

“I thought Thor was already dead?” Scarlet said.

“Well…”

“We’re going to his sodding tomb, aren’t we? He must be dead!”

Ryan sipped his beer. “Ragnarök was a way the Norse myths foretold the end of the world, and to them that meant submersion under water. I bring it up because I’m starting to hear Thor’s tomb and underwater tunnels in the same sentence.”

“Thanks for cheering us up,” Hawke said.

“He’s right though,” said Victoria. “Nate spoke to me about this as well. No one knows the significance of Ragnarök, but it’s where all the myths and legends come together. Loki finally breaks free from his chains, Thor will fight the World Serpent… everything.”

“I’m not digging the future tense here guys,” Lea said nervously. “I thought all this stuff happened millions of years in the past?”

“It did,” Ryan said. “And it didn’t.”

“Someone get me another Absolut,” Scarlet said. “Immediately.”

Victoria glanced at her watch again. “Goodness, you really do drink rather a lot, don’t you?”

Scarlet went to reply, but Hawke stopped her before the first word left her lips. “All right,” he said. “We can talk about Ragnarök later but right now we’ve got the advantage over Sala so let’s not waste it. We know what we’re looking for and where to start searching. Ryan, start looking into the most obvious places a tunnel could be hidden in the vicinity Alex has described.”

“Got it.”

“Lea, get on the phone to Eden. We need the jet fuelled and ready to fly to Lapland as soon as possible.”

“On it.”

“What about me?” Scarlet asked.

“Stop being a tit to Ryan.”

As Lea made the call, Hawke turned and gazed out of the window once more. His eyes fell on another tourist boat as it trundled from one side of the lake to the other, everyone on board totally oblivious to the threat looming over them. In his heart there was always hope, but Ryan’s talk of Ragnarök had begun to set his nerves on edge and with Vincent unconscious in hospital they were a man down.

He finished his beer and set the bottle on the table.

It was time to unearth Thor’s tomb.