The Ship of the Dead
Rick Riordan
While Mokkerkalfe struggled to comprehend the strange hallucination he was having, I returned my attention to T.J.
I put both hands against his sternum and summoned the power of Frey.
Sunlight spread across the blue wool fibers of his jacket. Warmth sank into his chest, knitting his broken ribs, mending his punctured lungs, un-flattening several internal organs that did not function well when they were flattened.
As my healing power flowed into Thomas Jefferson Jr., his memories backwashed into my mind. I saw his mother in a faded gingham dress, her hair prematurely gray, her face stretched thin from years of hard work and worry. She knelt in front of ten-year-old T.J., her hands tightly clasping his shoulders as if she were afraid he might blow away in a storm.
“Don’t you ever point that at a white man,” she scolded.
“Ma, it’s just a stick,” T.J. said. “I’m playing.”
“You don’t get to play,” she snapped. “You play-shoot at a white man with a stick, he’s going to real-shoot you back with a gun. I’m not losing another child, Thomas. You hear me?”
She shook him, trying to rattle the message into him.
A different image: T.J. as a teenager, reading a flyer posted on a brick wall by the wharf:
TO COLORED MEN
!FREEDOM! PROTECTION, PAY, AND A CALL TO MILITARY SERVICE!
I could sense T.J.’s pulse racing. He had never been so excited. His hands itched to hold a rifle. He felt a calling—an undeniable impulse, like all those times he’d been challenged to fistfights in the alley behind his ma’s tavern. This was a personal challenge, and he could not refuse it.
I saw him in the hold of a Union ship, the seas pitching as his comrades threw up in buckets on either side of him. A friend of his, William H. Butler, groaned in misery. “They bring our people over on slave ships. They free us. They promise to pay us to fight. Then they put us right back into the belly of a ship.” But T.J. held his rifle eagerly, his heart pumping with excitement. He was proud of his uniform. Proud of those stars and stripes flapping on the mast somewhere over their heads. The Union had given him a real gun. They were paying him to shoot rebels—white men who would most definitely kill him given a chance. He grinned in the dark.
Then I saw him running across no-man’s-land at the battle of Fort Wagner, gun smoke rising like volcanic gas all around him. The air was thick with sulfur and the screams of the wounded, but T.J. stayed focused on his nemesis, Jeffrey Toussaint, who had dared to call him out. T.J. leveled his bayonet and charged, exhilarated by the sudden fear in Toussaint’s eyes.
Back in the present, T.J. gasped. Behind his amber-rimmed glasses, his vision cleared.
He croaked, “My left, your right.”
I dove to one side. I’ll admit I didn’t have time to distinguish left from right. I rolled onto my back as T.J. raised his rifle and fired.
Hrungnir, now free of Pottery Barn’s affections, loomed over us, his maul raised for one final strike. T.J.’s musket ball caught him in the right eye, snuffing out his sight.
“RARG!” Hrungnir dropped his weapon and sat down hard in the middle of King’s Square, crushing two park benches under his ample butt. In a nearby tree, Pottery Barn hung broken and battered, their left leg dangling from a branch ten feet above their head, but when they saw Hrungnir’s predicament, they grinded their head against their neck with a sound like laughter.
“Go!” T.J. snapped me out of my shock. “Help Alex!”
I scrambled to my feet and ran.
Jack was still trying to entertain Mokkerkalfe, but his song-and-dance routine was wearing thin. (That happens quickly with Jack.) Mokkerkalfe tried to swat him aside. The blade got stuck on the back of the clay man’s sticky hand.
“Yuck!” Jack complained. “Let me go!”
Jack was a little obsessive about cleanliness. After lying at the bottom of the Charles River for a thousand years, he wasn’t a fan of mud.
As Mokkerkalfe stomped around, trying to dislodge the talking sword from his hand, I ran to Alex’s side. She was spread-eagled, shellacked in clay from head to foot, groaning and twitching her fingers.
I knew Alex didn’t like my healing powers. She hated the idea of me peeking into her emotions and memories, which just happened automatically as part of the process. But I decided her survival outweighed her right to privacy.
I clamped my hand on her shoulder. Golden light seeped through my fingers. Warmth poured into Alex’s body, working its way from her shoulder into her core.
I steeled myself for more painful images. I was ready to face her awful father again, or see how badly Alex had been bullied at school, or how she’d been beaten up in the homeless shelters.
Instead, a single clear memory hit me: nothing special, just breakfast at Café 19 in Valhalla, a quick snapshot of me, stupid Magnus Chase, the way Alex saw me. I was sitting across the table from her, grinning at something she’d just said. A little glob of bread was stuck between my front teeth. My hair was messy. I looked relaxed and happy and utterly dorky. I held Alex’s gaze for a second too long and things got awkward. I blushed and looked away.
That was her entire memory.
I recalled that morning. I remembered thinking at the time: Well, I’ve made a complete idiot of myself, as usual. But it had hardly been an earthshaking event.
So why was it at the top of Alex’s memories? And why did I feel such a rush of satisfaction seeing my dorky self from Alex’s perspective?
Alex opened her eyes abruptly. She swatted my hand off her shoulder. “Stop that.”
“Sorry, I—”
“My right, your left!”
I dove one way. Alex rolled the other. Mokkerkalfe’s fist, now free of Jack’s blade, slammed into the slate pavement between us. I caught a glimpse of Jack, leaning in the doorway of the Boots pharmacy, covered with mud and groaning like a dying soldier, “He got me! He got me!”
The clay man rose, ready to kill us. Jack would be no help. Alex and I were not up to this fight. Then a pile of pottery hurtled out of nowhere and landed on Mokkerkalfe’s back. Somehow, Pottery Barn had extricated themselves from the tree. Despite their missing left leg, despite their right vase hand being cracked to shards, Pottery Barn went into ceramic-berserker overdrive. They ripped into Mokkerkalfe’s back, gouging out chunks of wet clay as if excavating a collapsed well.
Mokkerkalfe stumbled. He tried to grab Pottery Barn, but his arms were too short. Then, with a sucking POP, Pottery Barn pulled something from Mokkerkalfe’s chest cavity and both warriors collapsed.
Mokkerkalfe steamed and began to melt. Pottery Barn rolled off their enemy’s carcass, their double faces turning toward Alex. Weakly, they lifted the thing they were holding. When I realized what it was, my garlic-bagel breakfast threatened to come back up again.
Pottery Barn was offering Alex the heart of their enemy—an actual heart muscle, much too big for a human. Maybe it had belonged to a horse or a cow? I decided I’d rather remain ignorant.
Alex knelt by Pottery Barn’s side. She placed her hand across the warrior’s double foreheads. “You did well,” she said, her voice quavering. “My Tlatilcan ancestors would be proud of you. My grandfather would be proud. Most of all, I’m proud.”
The gold light flickered in the skull face’s eye sockets, then went out. Pottery Barn’s arms collapsed. Their pieces lost magical cohesion and fell apart.
Alex allowed herself the space of three heartbeats to grieve. I could count them, because that gross muscle between Pottery Barn’s hands was still beating. Then she rose, clenched her fists, and turned toward Hrungnir.
The giant was not doing so well. He lay curled on his side, blind and gurgling in pain. T.J. walked around him, using his bone-steel bayonet to cut the giant’s sinews. Hrungnir’s Achilles tendons were already severed, making his legs useless. T.J. worked with cold, vicious efficiency to give the jotun’s arms the same treatment.
“Tyr’s tush,” Alex swore, the anger drainin
g from her face. “Remind me never to duel Jefferson.”
We walked over to join him.
T.J. pressed the tip of his bayonet against the giant’s chest. “We won, Hrungnir. Give us the location of Kvasir’s Mead and I don’t have to kill you.”
Hrungnir cackled weakly. His teeth were spattered with gray liquid, like the buckets of slip back at the pottery studio.
“Oh, but you do have to kill me, little einherji,” he croaked. “It’s part of the duel! Better than leaving me here hobbled and in agony!”
“I could heal you,” I offered.
Hrungnir curled his lip. “How typical of a weak, pathetic Frey-son. I welcome death! I will re-form from the icy abyss of Ginnungagap! And on the day of Ragnarok, I will find you on the field of Vigridr and crack your skull between my teeth!”
“Okay, then,” T.J. said. “Death it is! But first, the location of Kvasir’s Mead.”
“Heh.” Hrungnir gurgled more gray slip. “Very well. It won’t matter. You’ll never get past the guards. Go to Fläm, in the old Norse land you call Norway. Take the train. You’ll see what you’re after quick enough.”
“Fläm?” I got a mental image of a tasty caramel dessert. Then I remembered that was flan.
“That’s right,” Hrungnir said. “Now kill me, son of Tyr! Go on. Right in the heart, unless you are as weak-willed as your friend!”
Alex started to say, “T.J….”
“Wait,” I muttered.
Something was wrong. Hrungnir’s tone was too mocking, too eager. But I was slow to compute the problem. Before I could suggest we should kill the giant some other way, T.J. accepted Hrungnir’s final challenge.
He jabbed his bayonet into the giant’s chest. The point hit something inside with a hard clink!
“Ahh.” Hrungnir’s death gasp sounded almost smug.
“Hey, guys?” Jack’s weak voice called from over at the pharmacy. “Don’t pierce his heart, okay? Stone giants’ hearts explode.”
Alex’s eyes widened. “Hit the deck!”
KA-BLAM!
Shards of Hrungnir sprayed the square, breaking windows, destroying signs, and peppering brick walls.
My ears rang. The air smelled of flint sparks. Where the giant Hrungnir had lain, nothing remained but a smoking line of gravel.
I seemed unhurt. Alex looked okay. But T.J. knelt, groaning, with his hand cupped over his bleeding forehead.
“Let me see!” I rushed to his side, but the damage wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. A piece of shrapnel had embedded itself above his right eye—a triangular gray splinter like a flint exclamation point.
“Get it out!” he yelled.
I tried, but as soon as I pulled, T.J. howled in pain. I frowned. That made no medical sense. The shard couldn’t be that deep. There wasn’t even that much blood.
“Guys?” Alex said. “We have visitors.”
The locals were finally starting to come outside to check on the commotion, probably because Hrungnir’s exploding heart had shattered every window on the block.
“Can you walk?” I asked T.J.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Then let’s get you back to the ship. We’ll heal you there.”
I helped him to his feet, then went to retrieve Jack, who was still moaning about being covered in mud. I put him back into runestone form, which did not help my level of exhaustion. Alex knelt next to the remnants of Pottery Barn. She picked up their detached head, cradling it like an abandoned infant.
Then the three of us staggered back through York to find the Big Banana. I just hoped the water horses hadn’t sunk it along with our friends.
THE SHIP was still intact. Halfborn, Mallory, and Samirah looked like they’d paid a heavy price to keep it that way.
Halfborn’s left arm was in a sling. Mallory’s wild red hair had been shorn off at chin-level. Sam stood at the rail dripping wet, wringing out her magic hijab.
“Water horses?” I asked.
Halfborn shrugged. “Nothing we couldn’t handle. Half a dozen attacks since yesterday afternoon. About what I figured.”
“One pulled me into the river by my hair,” Mallory complained.
Halfborn grinned. “I think I gave you a pretty good haircut, considering I only had my battle-ax to work with. Let me tell you, Magnus, with the blade so close to her neck, I was tempted—”
“Shut up, oaf,” Mallory growled.
“Exactly my point,” said Halfborn. “But Samirah, now—you should’ve seen her. She was impressive.”
“It was nothing,” Sam muttered.
Mallory snorted. “Nothing? You got dragged under the river and came up riding a water horse. You mastered that beast. I’ve never heard of anyone who could do that.”
Samirah winced slightly. She gave her hijab another twist, as if she wanted to squeeze out the last drops of the experience. “Valkyries get on well with horses. That’s probably all it was.”
“Hmm.” Halfborn pointed at me. “What about you all? You’re alive, I see.”
We told him the story of our night in the pottery studio and our morning destroying King’s Square.
Mallory frowned at Alex, who was still covered in clay. “That would explain Fierro’s new coat of paint.”
“And the rock in T.J.’s head.” Halfborn leaned closer to inspect the shrapnel. T.J.’s forehead had stopped bleeding. The swelling was down. But for reasons unknown, the sliver of flint still refused to come out. Whenever I tried to pull it, T.J. yelped in pain. Fixed above his eyebrow, the little shard gave him a look of permanent surprise.
“Does it hurt?” Halfborn asked.
“Not anymore,” T.J. said sheepishly. “Not unless you try to remove it.”
“Hold on, then.” With his good hand, Halfborn rummaged through his belt pouch. He pulled out a box of matches, fumbled one free, then struck it against T.J.’s flint. The match burst into flames immediately.
“Hey!” T.J. complained.
“You have a new superpower, my friend!” Halfborn grinned. “That could be useful!”
“Right, enough of that,” Mallory said. “Glad you all survived, but did you get information from the giant?”
“Yeah,” Alex said, cradling the head of Pottery Barn. “Kvasir’s Mead is in Norway. Some place called Fläm.”
The lit match slipped from Halfborn’s fingers and landed on the deck.
T.J. stomped out the flame. “You all right, big guy? You look like you’ve seen a draugr.”
An earthquake seemed to be happening under Halfborn’s whiskers. “Jorvik was bad enough,” he said. “Now Fläm? What are the odds?”
“You know the place,” I guessed.
“I’m going below,” he muttered.
“Want me to heal that arm first?”
He shook his head miserably, as if he was quite used to living with pain. Then he made his way down the ladder.
T.J. turned to Mallory. “What was that about?”
“Don’t look at me,” she snapped. “I’m not his keeper.”
But there was a twinge of concern in her voice.
“Let’s get under way,” Samirah suggested. “I don’t want to be on this river any longer than we have to.”
On that, we all agreed. York was pretty. It had good fish and chips and at least one decent pottery studio, but I was ready to get out of there.
Alex and T.J. went below to change clothes and rest up from their morning of combat. That left Mallory, Sam, and me to man the ship. It took us the rest of the day to navigate our way down the River Ouse and back out to sea, but the voyage was mercifully uneventful. No water horses stampeded us. No giants challenged us to combat or bingo. The worst thing we encountered was a low bridge, forcing us to fold down the mainmast, which may or may not have collapsed on top of me.
At sunset, as we left the coast of England behind, Sam did her ritual washing. She prayed facing southwest, then sat down next to me with a satisfied sigh and unwrapped a package of dates.
“Every sunset,” she said, “the taste of that date is like experiencing the joy of food for the first time. The flavor just explodes in your mouth.”
I chewed my date. It was okay. It did not explode or fill me with bliss. Then again, I hadn’t worked for it by fasting all day.
“Why dates?” I asked. “Why not, like, Twizzlers?”
“Just tradition.” She took another bite and made a contented mmm. “The Prophet Muhammad always broke fast by eating a few dates.”
“But you can have other stuff afterward, right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said gravely. “I intend to eat all the food. I understand Alex brought back some cherry soda? I want to try that as well.”
I shuddered. I could escape giants, countries, and even whole worlds, but it seemed I was never going to get away from Tizer. I had nightmares about all my friends grinning at me with red lips and cherry-tinted teeth.
While Sam went below to eat all the food, Mallory lounged at the rudder, keeping an eye on the horizon, though the ship seemed to know where we were going. From time to time, she touched her shoulders where her hair used to fall, then sighed unhappily.
I sympathized. Not long ago, Blitz had hacked off my hair to make magic embroidering thread for a bowling bag. I still had traumatic flashbacks.
“Sailing to Norway will take us a few days,” Mallory said. “The North Sea can get pretty rough. Unless anybody has a friendly sea god they can call on.”
I focused on my date. I wasn’t about to call for Njord’s help again. I’d seen enough of my granddad’s beautiful feet for one eternal lifetime. But I remembered what he had told me: After Jorvik, we were on our own. No divine protection. If Aegir or Ran or their daughters found us…
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” I said weakly.
Mallory snorted. “Yep. That happens a lot. Even if we get to Fläm safely, what’s this business about the mead having unbeatable guardians?”
I wished I knew. Guardians of the Mead sounded like another book I never wanted to read.
I recalled my dream of Odin offering me the whetstone, then his face morphing into something else: a leathery visage with green eyes and rows of teeth. I’d never faced a creature like that in real life, but the cold rage in its gaze had seemed uncomfortably, terrifyingly familiar. I thought about Hearthstone and Blitzen, and where Njord might have sent them to search for a rare stone. An idea began to coalesce, swirling into symmetry like a lump of clay on Alex’s wheel, but I didn’t like the shape it was taking on.
“We’ll need the whetstone to defeat the guardians,” I said. “I have no idea why. We just have to trust—”
Mallory laughed. “Trust? Right. I’ve got as much of that as I have luck.”
She drew one of her knives. Casually, holding the blade by the tip, she threw the knife at my feet. It impaled the yellow planking and quivered there like a Geiger-counter needle.
“Take a look,” she offered. “See why I don’t trust ‘secret weapons.’”
I pulled the knife from the deck. I’d never held one of Mallory’s weapons before. The blade was surprisingly light—so light it might get you into trouble. If you handled it like a standard dagger, wielding it with more force than necessary, this was the kind of knife that could leap out of your hand and cut your own face off.
The blade was a long, dark isosceles triangle etched with runes and Celtic knot designs, the handle wrapped in soft worn leather.
I wasn’t sure what Mallory wanted me to notice about it, so I just said the obvious: “Nice blade.”
