To be perfectly honest, Loki Laufeyson was done with the world. It will be fun, the professors back at the university had said. It’s a unique burial site they said. Change the archaeological world they said. We’ll pay for your trip to Iceland they said.
That sounded brilliant. He loved Iceland. He loved archaeology. He loved learning new things. It sounded right up his alley.
What they had neglected to mention was the minor possibility of summoning an undead Viking warrior.
It had been a simple site when they had arrived. It had only attracted attention because of the satellite mapping picking up several minor factors of interest, and local folklore speaking of a gravesite containing hundreds of bodies. If it was believed the site had the potential to be the largest discovered burial site of the time period. It seemed to be in good condition, surrounded on three sides by a glacier, and on the fourth a frozen over peat bog.
His college Jane and her student Darcy had been excavating the site with him in a run of the mill day when he had unearthed a metal box. They had all be irritated when some examination revealed it to be recent, buried within the last ten years. Somebody had hidden their treasure and was yet to return for it.
Curiosity had overtaken them and Darcy had convinced them to break the box open. So, using his own pocket knife he had broken the lock and heaved the lid open.
A wind had picked up out of the blue. There hadn’t even been a breeze the second before. It hd sounded like screams.
“This is some grade A horror movie cliche,” Darcy had commented as she looked around. “What’s in the box?”
They had peeked in, hoping for money. The box, rather disappointingly, had simply contained a single book, instead of the money they had been hoping to fund another research trip with. He had picked it up to look at it and found a lock attached to it, making it impossible to open. They had tried the knife on it and failed to break it open, so they had placed it back in the box and put it to one side for the rest of the day.
That night as they drank hot chocolate in a rented camper van they had heard a cracking and groaning from outside. The nearest settlement was over a kilometre away, so they assumed a walker had lost their way. By the sound of it they were on some thin ice, so they had hurried outside.
There were cracks in the peat bog. And as they watched a hand had forced its way through, then braced itself and pushed a body through the gap.
“Zombie?” Darcy checked.
“Zombie,” Jane confirmed. They had both exchanged glances, then shoved him towards the bog and taken off running towards the van.
So much for friendship.
“We made smores together!” he had bellowed. “Did that mean nothing?”
More cracks had splintered the bog. He had considered the situation, then run back to the van and retrieved a shovel. Meanwhile Darcy and Jane had emerged armed with a mattock and sledgehammer.
It had turned out to be remarkably easy to fight off the emerging ten zombies. Several years of being frozen meant that they broke remarkably easy when hit in the head.
“So,” Jane had said once they had finished and gone back to drink hot chocolate. “That just happened.”
“It did,” he said. “Marshmallows?”
She held her mug out and he tipped several out of the jar.
“Don’t we need to call the police or something? Tell them we just killed some zombies?” Darcy had said.
“And have them all over the site?” both him and Jane had gasped. “Digging it up? Removing contexts?”
“it was a reasonable suggestion!”
“I could get a second doctorate with this!” he had announced.
“I could make Nobel Prize!” Jane had declared. “Although, if we are going to be attacked by zombies, we should maybe take some precautions.”
“Excellent point,” Loki had said. And so, that night, they had stayed up researching the folklore and facts surrounding the area. Egil the warrior had apparently been buried on the site, along with at least one thousand others. Apparently his sister, a priestess, had cursed him for unknown reasons. And he was therefore fated to rise, along with the warriors, when a certain book was returned to human hands.
They had all turned to stare at the very modern box.
They had then had to take a break to fight off five more zombies.
When they had returned Loki had realised that in order to get his research, he was going to have to deal with an ancient Viking warrior.
“What shall we do?” Darcy had asked. And an idea had come to him.
“Who wants to go and find my brother?” he had asked. “He should be in Egypt.”
*
A predicament. That was what Thor Odinson was in. He had been in many a terrible situation before, that time when someone had tried to mug him at gunpoint, the attempted stabbing when he was a teen, the failed shoplifting attempt, the list went on and on.
To be fair though, all of those, through very rapid medical attention, could have ended without his family measuring a coffin for him. A hanging however, statistically speaking, ended in death.
“What happens if I survive?” he had asked the guard a week before.
“We hang you again,” the guard had said.
“What if I survive three times? Doesn’t that show a God loves me?”
“If you survive three times we’ll take you off the scaffold.”
He had seen a light at the end of the tunnel then, and begun praying for a weak rope.
“Because then it will be breakfast, and the executioner will be hungry. After he has eaten we will hang you again. And if that fails, we shall cut your head off.”
A short list of things Thor knew he could survive, provided they weren’t overdone. One, a beating. Two, a stabbing. Three, a gunshot.
An extremely short list of things Thor knew he could not survive.
One, decapitation.
It was a very short list.
But, unwilling to let them know they had worn him down, he had spoken up.
“Can I at least have the firing squad?”
And now, a week later, he was standing on top of a scaffold, hands cuffed behind his back and feet chained together. It wasn’t for lack of trying to escape that had left him there, the guards had changed his cell three times over the week when he had managed to pull the window bus free from his first cell and loosened a brick in the wall in the second. He had been attempting to break through the ceiling of the third when the guards had come to fetch him.
“Any last requests?” a guard asked.
“Let me go?” he tried. The guard looked over at the executioner, who cuffed him round the back of the head. The guard glared, then dropped the noose round his neck.
“You sure you wanna do this?” Thor tried. “I can make it worth your while if you don’t.”
“What do you have?” the executioner asked, looking him up and down. And Thor, armed with the knowledge that he hadn’t had a bath in three weeks, had been locked in jail for those three weeks, hadn’t seen a razor or hairbrush or toothbrush in those three weeks, took a shot.
“I’m exceptionally good in bed,” he said, grinning.
The executioner very nearly pulled the trapdoor lever.
“Wait!”
Everyone froze for a moment, and then Thor, keeping his feet as close to the edge of the trapdoor as possible, shifted his eyes down. The chief of the prison looked up at them. There was a woman by him. He hadn’t seen her before. The chief looked over at his guest and pointed up at him.
“That him?” he asked.
“Yes!” Thor yelled, despite not knowing the woman or what was going on. With the hindsight of two seconds he realised this was not a sensible thing to do when standing with a noose around one’s neck. If the woman was here to accuse him of murder he could think of many routes the resulting scenario would take. All of them ended in death, except for one where he seduced his captors, spent a charming in night in bed with them all, then left the next morning with everyone happy.
“I’ll give your fifty if you let him go unharmed,” the woman said.
“Five hundred,” the chief said.
“Hundred.”
“Four ninety.”
“One fifty.”
“Four fifty.”
“Two hundred.”
“Three fifty.”
“Three fifty,” the woman said quickly.
“Three hundred,” the chief said without thinking.
“Done!” the woman yelled.
The chief swore violently and looked up at them. “Cut him down!”
The guard and executioner looked rather disappointed, but the guard removed the noose from around his neck. Then, out of spite, both the guard and executioner shoved him off the scaffold.
It could be worse, he reminded himself as he landed on his side, his hands and feet still chained. He could be dead.
“Hello,” he said as the chief and woman walked towards him. He smiled. “What brings you here? With keys to these chains? Is it the keys?”
“My name is Jane. Loki sent me to find you,” the woman said. “You’re going to stop the warrior Egil.”
Two out of those three sentences were confusing, and one of those two made no sense. But he was alive.
“Superb!” he exclaimed. “When do we start?”
