Chapter 371: Loki’s climb

An hour earlier.

Loki’s day had gone as follows.

He had walked a magma-blooded creature up through the palace and shown it the way to the shield generator. And when the creature had finished its destructive work there, it had dropped him.

Not tried to kill him. Not spared him. It had simply set him down and walked away, the way a man puts down a tool he has finished with, leaving him standing in an empty gallery in the middle of a raging war.

That indifferent dismissal had stung a great deal more than the chains ever had.

And it was only the beginning of his troubles.

He spent the next hour learning what a war looks like from the very bottom of it. He, who had commanded armies. He, who had come down on Midgard with a fleet at his back and had not once wondered what any of it felt like from the ground, spent the burning of Asgard lying flat behind fallen rubble with his face in the dust, waiting for boots to go past.

He had no magic left to hide behind. No strength worth the name. He was a breakable man in ruined leather, alone in the upper reaches of a crumbling palace, and there was not one soul in the building who would be glad to see him alive.

The invading Dark Elves would kill him on sight. The defending Einherjar would seize him just as fast. A stray blast from either side would do the job just as thoroughly, and neither army would ever learn it had happened.

He was a soft, fragile thing on a battlefield of gods and monsters, and every single creature on it outranked him.

And so the proud Prince of Asgard, adopted son of Odin, rightful King of Jotunheim, did the only thing available to him.

He hid.

He moved from pillar to pillar, doorway to doorway, keeping to the dark, and every step of it cost him. His mortal body ached in ways it had never ached before the binding. The cold came up out of the marble and into him and would not leave again. And he had learned, inside the first minute, that there was nothing clever to be done about a stray bolt. Nothing to outwit. Nothing to smooth talk around. A bad angle and a bright light and that was the unceremonious end of Loki.

Escape was not an option. Escape to where? Off the palace grounds and into a burning city? Into the wilds beyond it, on mortal legs, with a mortal’s endurance, hunted by both sides? A year ago he could have stepped sideways through the dark paths between dimensions and been three realms away by supper. Today, he could not have outrun an elderly Einherjar with a limp.

He hated it. He hated the weakness, and he hated the way his heart went at the sound of running feet. And most of all he hated that some small honest part of him missed his cell. His books. His warm rug. The magical barrier humming its one endless note, and nothing at all in the Nine Realms able to reach him through it.

It had come to that. He was homesick for his own prison.

Which was, of course, currently in pieces, along with the rest of the lower levels, and had been since he had walked a monster past it and out of it.

So the cell was gone, and the city was burning, and there was nowhere in the Nine Realms left to put himself.

Except one place.

He did not name it, not even in his own head. He simply started climbing, gallery by gallery, shadow by shadow, up through a palace that was coming apart above him.

He told himself it was the sensible choice. He had been telling himself that for some time now.

Her chambers were the most heavily warded rooms in the realm, woven over a thousand years by the finest hand in the Nine Realms, and whatever had come down out of that fleet, none of it would get through her doors. Nothing ever had. If any room in Asgard was still standing at the end of the day, it would be that one.

There. A sound reason, arrived at by a clear head, and he did not examine it any further, because it had a hole in it and he knew exactly where the hole was.

The creature had gone exactly this way.

Up out of the generator, through the palace, into the royal wing. Which meant that whatever else her chambers were, they were not the safest place in Asgard today. The old dungeon passages were emptier. The deep vaults were sealed. There were a dozen holes in this palace he could have crawled into where nothing was walking at all.

He shoved all of that logic where he had put everything else today and walked faster.

There was no cause for it. She was the finest sorceress in the Nine Realms and she had been so since long before he could walk. She had never needed anyone’s help, and if she had ever needed it, she would not have needed it from a mortal in ruined leather who could not even open a locked door without a key.

He knew that perfectly well. He had run the whole argument twice and it came out the same both times.

And underneath it, low and steady and entirely unreasonable, sat the thing that had been sitting there.

He wanted to see her.

Not to help. He could not help. He simply wanted to put his eyes on his mother and find her well, standing in her own rooms with her hands folded and something faintly disappointed in her face. And once he had done that he could go and find somewhere to hide and be useless in peace.

That was all it was.

He was not frightened for her.

He was climbing three steps at a time now, on legs that had been aching for an hour, and he did not slow down for any of it.

—

The climb was worse than the hiding.

The main staircases were gone. Collapsed, barricaded, or overrun. Which left the servants’ passages, the narrow corridors and hidden stairs he had found as a child and never once forgotten, and they were dark and cramped and choked with dust, and twice he had to stop and put a hand against the wall and wait for his lungs to stop burning.

If I had my magic, he thought, I would already be there. One simple step through the dark and I would be standing beside her.

He stopped the thought there, because he knew where it went next.

It went to a lock that would open itself the moment he understood it, and a riddle he had been failing to find for a year, and a brother who had found his in three days.

He pushed off the wall and kept climbing.

—

He came up the last of the stairs into the upper corridors gasping, one hand against the wall.

Something was happening in the Queen’s chambers. Something loud.

Loki got himself behind a thick marble column outside her doors, made himself small, and listened.

He could not see anything from where he was, and he was not going to look. He told himself that was strategy. In truth he knew exactly what he would be, walking into that room in this body, with no magic and no blade and nothing at all to offer. He would be one more thing she had to keep alive.

So he stayed where he was and listened.

He heard the grinding roar of something that was not a man. He heard stone breaking, and breaking again.

And under all of it, clear and unhurried and entirely unafraid, he heard his mother’s voice.

Loki let out a breath he had not known he was holding.

She had it in hand. Of course she had it in hand. She always had.

Which meant there was nothing to stay for. The corridor was empty. The stairs were twenty feet behind him and not one soul in the Nine Realms knew he was standing here. Every part of him that had kept him alive for a thousand years was telling him to be elsewhere immediately.

He stayed exactly where he was.

He stood with his back against cold marble in a corridor he had no business being in, listening to a fight he could not affect, waiting for a woman who did not know he was there to finish winning.

Then the wall came apart.

The beast came through it in a wave of golden light and broken stone and hit the corridor floor eight feet from where Loki was standing, and the ornate railing went over the edge behind it in pieces.

Loki did not move a single muscle.

A year ago he would have been three corridors away before the dust settled. He would have been a shadow on a wall, a trick of the light, nothing at all. He had spent many centuries proudly being the one thing in this palace that could not be caught.

He held his breath instead.

It was all he had, and he was not even good at that.

The burning head came around.

The two dark slots in the bone plate found him immediately. There was no surprise in them and no interest either. Only the small flat recognition of something noticing a convenient tool within easy reach.

Then the burning hand closed around his throat.

Loki choked. His desperate fingers went to the arm and found something like hot stone with a current running underneath it, and he clawed at it anyway, because there was nothing else to do with his hands. There was no magic to reach for. There was no strength in him to bring up. His feet came off the floor and stayed there, kicking at nothing at all, and none of it made the slightest difference to the thing holding him.

He was carried back through the ruined archway and into his mother’s rooms like a satchel.