Chapter 362: The Quiet Prisoner
The Bifrost came down in a column of light and left the smell of burnt air behind it.
Fandral strolled out first, still laughing at something Volstagg had said halfway across the galaxy, and the laugh carried him three steps down the bridge before the rest arrived behind him. Hogun. Volstagg. Two dozen Einherjar in gleaming gold armor.
And between the soldiers, chained wrist to wrist in a long shuffling line, were the marauders.
The campaign had finished a week early. Vanaheim was quiet, the raiders were broken, and the worst of them were coming home to Asgard for trial.
A silver blur came up the rainbow bridge and stopped alongside them, matching their pace without any apparent effort.
"You guys took your time," Pietro said, bouncing lightly on his toes as he walked. "I was starting to think you’d got lost on the way home."
Fandral grinned and wiped a streak of soot off his cheek. "Pietro! A very pleasant surprise, and a full week ahead of our next scheduled session." He looked past the speedster, down the empty bridge. "Are the little ones with you?"
"No. Just me and my sister this time. And Winky."
"I did not know you were so driven." Hogun’s voice did not change much, which was how you knew he was enjoying himself. "Early for combat training. And landing on the one week we have absolutely nothing to do."
"Please. I haven’t recovered from the last one." Pietro’s face did something complicated. "Arthur sent us. Said there might be some fun on the horizon. He didn’t explain, obviously. But my sister says that when Arthur says something like that, it usually means something’s about to—"
"Brother."
Wanda had come down the bridge behind him at a walking pace, the way ordinary people arrived places, and she did not raise her voice at all.
"Not in front of them." Her eyes were not on him. They were on the chained line coming up the bridge. "At least wait until they have passed out of earshot."
Pietro glanced at the chained line and closed his mouth, because he knew that tone. It was the one that meant she was not joking and would not say it twice.
Wanda was looking at one prisoner in particular.
He stood a head above the tallest of the others, and he wore a mask of bone-white plate, horned, covering his whole face. Every other man in that line was either sagging under the walk or performing defiance for the guards. Fear, or the loud pretence of not being afraid. It came off them like heat off stone, and her magic read it without being asked to.
This one gave her nothing.
He walked. Unhurried, balanced, as though the chains were a costume he had agreed to wear, and where the rest of the line burned, there was simply a closed door.
The masked head turned slowly, and for one brief second, the dark, empty slots of the bone mask rested directly on her.
Then the shuffling line moved on and carried him with it toward the dungeons.
"Fandral." Wanda said quietly, keeping her eyes on the column as it went. "Who is that?"
"Him?" Fandral glanced over without much interest. "We took him off a moon in the Vanaheim reach. No ship, no crew, no explanation. He was tearing the place apart on his own, and he had killed twenty men by the time we came down."
"Did he give you a good fight, at least?" Pietro asked eagerly.
"He surrendered." Volstagg sounded personally wounded by it. "Threw down his blade and raised his hands. Very tidy. Very boring."
"I had been looking forward to that one," Fandral sighed. "A great disappointment."
"He doesn’t feel like a prisoner." Wanda murmured, still watching him go. "There’s nothing in him at all."
Volstagg laughed, and it was a warm, uncomplicated sound.
"They are all like that at the start, my girl. Every one of them walks in like a king. Then comes the trial, and the sentence, and the doors close, and all that pride goes out of them like air from a bladder." He steered her toward the city with one enormous hand. "The dungeons of Asgard have humbled better monsters than that one. Come. Feast. A small feast."
"A great feast," Fandral corrected.
Wanda went with them, and laughed where laughing was called for, and did not mention it again.
Behind them, the prisoner in the horned mask was marched down through the golden streets toward the dungeon stair, past towers and gardens and five thousand years of the finest city ever raised.
He did not look at any of it.
A man taken somewhere against his will looks at everything, because he is measuring the walls. This one had already seen what he came to see.
—
Deep inside the golden palace, Jane Foster was having the time of her life.
She lay flat on a raised, intricately carved golden table, ignoring the solemn atmosphere of the room entirely. Above her, an array of glowing threads turned and rearranged themselves, reading her body a layer at a time.
"That’s a quantum field generator, isn’t it?" Jane twisted her neck to see the machinery better.
"It is a Soul Forge." Eir, who was the finest healer in the Nine Realms and had never once been asked what her instruments were made of, kept her hands steady in the light.
"Does a Soul Forge transfer molecular energy from one place to another?"
"It does."
"Quantum field generator," Jane muttered happily.
Thor stood at the foot of the forge and managed something close to a smile. She was always like this in Asgard. One of her greatest joys was taking the wonders of the golden realm apart and putting them back together with Midgardian names on them.
The smile did not reach the rest of his face, however, because he had not looked away from one corner of the lattice since Eir raised it, where a very small dark speck pulsed near her heart.
He was still looking at it when the doors opened.
Odin came in without ceremony, Gungnir ringing softly on the stone, and the room straightened around him. Jane folded her hands on her stomach and said nothing. Years of visits, and the All-Father had never once addressed her directly. She had learned to make herself small when he passed.
"Father." Thor inclined his head. "Thank you for coming."
"Show me."
Eir moved her hands through the light. The image swam and steadied.
"What exactly happened here?" Odin’s eye narrowed at the projection.
"She was host to the Aether."
The words landed in the room and stayed there.
"The Aether." Odin came closer, and for the first time in all her years of visits, the All-Father looked at Jane Foster. Looked at her properly, with his whole attention, the way she had once imagined he might. It had unfortunately taken becoming a piece of evidence to do it. She lay under that single grey eye and found she preferred the old arrangement. "You are certain. And it was taken out of her without killing her?"
"Arthur did it," Thor replied. "Jane said he held a device that did the work."
Odin did not ask a second time. He had been prepared to doubt a great many things about tonight, and Hayes being wrong about an Infinity Stone was not among them. Of everyone mortal, the mage understood best what those things weighed.
"Then it is contained?"
"He has it."
"That is not what I asked."
"I offered him the vault, Father. He said bringing it here would be bringing the danger here, and that he had somewhere better in mind." Thor’s jaw set. "I did not argue."
Odin said nothing to that. It was not agreement, and Thor did not mistake it for agreement.
Thor pointed into the hologram. "The reason I called you here is this."
Odin looked at the pulsing black mark for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had changed.
"Who else has seen this?"
"Eir. Two of her healers. Myself. Jane."
"Nobody else looks at it." His eye had not left the speck. "Nobody else is told."
"Father." Thor let a heavy beat pass. "Is that Dark Elf magic?"
"The Dark Elves are extinct. My father broke their armies at Svartalfheim. Their fleet burned, and their king burned in it." Odin turned from the lattice. "They are a dead race, Thor."
"Eir says the speck is acting like a tracker. It is sending, Father. Actively. From this room, from her body, out into the dark." Thor did not move. "If they are all dead, who is receiving it?"
"Nobody. Magic outlives the men who make it. You have seen a hundred cursed blades in my vault, and every one of them was forged by a hand that is dust. They do not stop. They were not built to stop." Gungnir’s heel came down on the stone. "A speck of old magic is not cause to doubt your king and the history of your ancestors."
"Arthur put the same suspicion to my face a few hours ago, and I told him he was wrong." Thor held his father’s eye. "I believed what you have just said. I believed it until I stood in this room and saw it for myself."
Something in Odin’s expression shifted.
"What did Hayes say? His exact words."
Thor looked at his father. He had been speaking for several minutes and his father had not listened to a word of it. Now Hayes had been quoted once, and the All-Father was listening properly. Thor thought about asking why. Then it occurred to him that he might not like the answer, and he put it away for another century.
"He said there was magic woven through the Aether that was not Asgardian, and not anything in his library. Elven, he thought." Thor was reciting carefully now. "And then he said the part that troubled him. It had not decayed. Five thousand years, and it was working exactly as well as the day it was laid." He paused. "Something was maintaining it."
"And his conclusion?"
"That the Convergence and a waking Aether in the same week were too much of a coincidence." Thor’s mouth was flat. "He asked me to bring it to you. He believes that the Dark Elves may not be extinct at all."
Odin looked at the golden lattice and did not answer.
"What has the wizard done since?"
"Nothing. He cannot." Thor’s voice dropped. "Something went wrong when he extracted the Aether from Jane. She watched it happen, and she says it nearly killed him. I felt it myself when I took his shoulder. His magic does not sit in him properly." A beat. "But he sent the twins in his stead."
"The swift one and the chaos mage?"
"Yes."
"Why."
"He said there might be action, here or on Midgard. He said if there was, they would learn more in one afternoon beside the warriors than in a year of his training." Thor shook his head slowly. "He sent them even though I told him no one would be foolish enough to attack Asgard."
Odin was quiet for a long while, and the low hum of the Soul Forge filled the room and did not comfort anybody in it.
"What do you believe, Thor?"
"That there is nothing lost in being ready." Thor did not hesitate. "The old stories say the Dark Elves needed a Convergence for their design, and a Convergence is what we have. If we are wrong, we have spent a day on drills and heard some grumbling from the watch." He looked at Jane. "If we are right, and we did nothing, we will have lost a great deal more than that."
Odin looked at his son for a moment, and what crossed his face was rare, and tired, and something close to pride. The boy was finally thinking like a king.
"Then I leave it in your hands. Take the Midgardian to your mother and have her lift the elven working. There is no one living who understands that craft better." Gungnir turned in his grip. "Then see to the defences. The Bifrost watch doubled. The fleet manned before the alignment rather than during it. Heimdall sweeping the dark between the realms."
"And the city?"
"The city sleeps." Odin turned for the doors, and paused. "Fear travels faster than any army, Thor, and it opens more gates. Let them feast. You will do the worrying for them."
He went out, and Gungnir rang away down the corridor.
Jane sat up slowly on the golden table, and looked at the small dark speck still turning in the light above her, and said nothing at all.