Underworlds #4: The Ice Dragon by Tony Abbott Read Free Book Online

us,” I said. “We’re going. Dana’s down there. Is everybody ready?”
    Ready or not, Jon and Sydney joined me on deck. With a great heave, Thor and Odin and a dozen others pushed the ship away from shore.
    “You helped us today,” said Odin. “May good fortune and luck be your guides!”
    I would have liked a dozen extra-large gods to be our guides, but I guess when they went to Niflheim it was a one-way journey. As the ship floated free on the water, we quickly squirreled ourselves behind thearched prow, where I began plucking one string of the lyre, then a second, then a third until the flames leaned away from us.
    The waves drew us quickly across the Sea of Asgard toward a range of distant rocks, where there was a narrow pass to the oceans beyond.
    I kept playing the lyre to slow the fire’s progress, and it was working. Even though the flames roared up in a ring around Baldur, his body was untouched. His face, visible above the shroud, appeared as friendly and alive as the first time we saw him.
    And there was a reason for that.
    “A little hot, isn’t it?” Baldur sat straight up, saw the flames, and screamed. “Ahhhhhh!”
    Jon and Sydney screamed, too. “Ahhhhhh!”
    I quickly changed the lyre’s melody, and the flames went out in a puff of gray smoke.
    “What?” I gasped. “Baldur! How?”
    Sydney frowned. “Maybe because it wasn’t Ragnarok, after all? So Baldur couldn’t die?”
    Baldur laughed, then tugged the sprig of mistletoe from his neck, sniffed it, and tossed it overboard.“Well, it’s a good thing you put that fire out,” he said. He noticed that we were approaching the distant rocks, and his face twisted. “Oh. I guess I know where we’re going….”
    The wind picked up, and the waves began to push the ship toward the narrow opening in a range of cliffs that separated the Sea of Asgard from the wide oceans beyond.
    “Hold on,” said Jon, standing at the prow. “The space between those rocks is pretty tight. I might be able to steer us between them. Only please tell me the Norse myths don’t have rocks like the Greek myths do, where they crash together and destroy all the ships going between them. Tell me.”
    Sydney looked up from Dana’s book at Baldur. “Uh …”
    Baldur looked from Sydney to the rocks. “Uh …”
    Jon groaned. “You’re kidding me!”
    The sound of clashing stone was like a thunderclap as the great black cliffs unhinged and struck each other, sending an avalanche of shattered rock into the sea. Before we could do anything to stop them, therocks pulled apart, and the current sucked our ship toward them.
    “I’ve got it!” Baldur shouted, grabbing hold of the rudder. “Just a twist and a turn and a —”
    Sydney grabbed my arm. “Look there! On the cliffs!” A thin figure dressed in black from head to foot bounded from rock to rock above us. It was clearly a man. He ducked when the waves washed up, and then made his way, ledge by ledge, to the water’s edge.
    “We’ve seen a guy like that before,” said Jon. “It looks like …” His jaw fell open. “Wait a second … the stranger at the museum?”
    “The thief?” said Sydney. “The stranger who’s after the lyre!”
    In a flash it came back to me — the shadowy figure, skulking through the halls of the art museum the night we plotted to steal the Lyre of Orpheus.
    “Hey!” I shouted up at him.
    The man stopped on a ledge. He raised his right hand high. Then he raised his fingers, first four of them, then two, then three, and finally one.
    “Who are you?” I called out. “What do you want?”
    But the man simply repeated what he did with his fingers. Four, two, three, one.
    We lost sight of him as the ship spun forward.
    “Get ready to row!” said Baldur as the prow nosed between the rocks. “If I wasn’t dead before, I may be soon!” I hoped he was just kidding, but we huddled over the oars as he weaved the ship from side to side, slowing its forward motion until the