and he admitted, “Probably not. It’s trickier than it looks. I might send us somewhere really dangerous by mistake.”
“What, more dangerous than Hell?”
“You never know,” Angelo said in a half-whisper. “There could be worse places out there. It’s not like Heaven and Hell are the only afterlives, is it?”
Zac frowned. “Isn’t it?”
“No!” Angelo laughed. “They’re all real.”
“What do you mean? What’s all real?”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
Zac gritted his teeth. “Know what?”
“That every religion in history has been right. Although,” Angelo added quickly, “Christianity is more right than the others, obviously. There are thousands of afterlives out there. Xibalba. That was the Mayan underworld. Then there’s, let’s see... Olympus, home of the Greek Gods. Adlivun...”
“What’s Adlivun?”
“It’s where Sedna the She-Cannibal lives,” Angelo explained. “But I wouldn’t recommend going there. Everyone says she’s a right cow. Besides, it’s underwater, so we’d get wet.”
Zac rubbed his temples. “This is nuts,” he said. “This is too nuts.”
He straightened and looked around them. The stone building they were next to stood at the top of a high hill. A number of other large buildings stood close to one another down the snowy slopes, as if huddling together for warmth. They all gleamed in the faint sunlight, each one a palace of silver or gold.
Beyond them, the snow extended miles into the distance until it met a wall that stood several hundred metres high. Clearly someone wanted to keep whatever lay on the other side of the wall out.
A kilometre or so in the other direction, the land stopped like a shore meeting the sea. There was no water there, though, just blue sky and a bank of cloud and, if Zac looked hard enough, the beginnings of a rainbow leading away from the edge.
“So, where are we now?” asked Zac. Despite the mounting evidence, he was still finding it hard to believe any of what he was being told. “Santa’s grotto?”
“Haha, very funny. Of course it isn’t.” Angelo gave Zac a playful nudge on the arm. “Santa’s grotto’s got a green roof. I don’t know where this is.”
Zac looked at the door. The wood was dark, and the metal handle had been sculpted into the shape of a gargoyle-like head. An iron ring was gripped in the creature’s unmoving mouth. The place may have sounded quite jolly, but it didn’t look particularly inviting.
“Only one way to find out,” he said; then he turned the handle, pushed open the door and stepped inside.
A moment before, the bar had been filled with the sounds of cheering and laughter and the loud-mouthed gloating of a hundred drunken men. Tankards had clattered against tankards, ale had been quaffed, food had been scoffed and the din of it all had been deafening.
That all stopped when Zac and Angelo stepped into the Great Hall. The laughter died. The cheering ceased. And an amusing ditty about ritual disembowelment came to an abrupt, scratchy halt. A sea of horned helmets turned as one in the direction of the door.
An enormous wooden table filled the hall. It groaned beneath the weight of the feast spread out upon it. If you could call it a feast. It looked to be light on food and heavy on alcohol.
Standing in the corner closest to the door, a bearded man who had been juggling six short swords lost his concentration and then, a moment later, lost several of his toes. He didn’t scream. He didn’t so much as gasp, and as the echo of the clattering swords faded, silence filled the vast room.
Zac felt Angelo step close behind him. He surveyed the faces that looked back at him. Their expressions were a blend of surprise, confusion and annoyance, all tied up in bristly beards and long, matted hair.
The silence was broken by the sound of chair legs scraping on the flagstone floor. At the far head of the table, a man stood up.
At least, Zac assumed he was a man. He was man-shaped, certainly, but looked to have been scaled up somewhere along the way. He stood taller than anyone Zac had ever seen, with shoulders broader than the average family car. Across those shoulders he wore a cape lined at the edges with white and grey fur.
On his head was a helmet with three horns – one each side, and a third sticking up from the front like a unicorn’s. A grubby white patch covered one of his eyes. On it, someone had drawn a cartoon eye in black marker pen. It was surprisingly effective.
The man’s beard was Father-Christmas white. His long hair hung in pigtails, dangling down over the top of the metal breastplate that was strapped across his chest. Unlike Michael’s armour, this stuff had been well used, and was now dented in more places than it was smooth.
Both the real eye and the hand-drawn one glared at Zac and Angelo as, somewhere in the beard, the man’s mouth began to speak.
“Who dares enter the Hall of Valhalla?” he demanded. It was a strong, commanding voice. The type of voice that could rouse sea serpents from the deep, and make avalanches change their minds and head back uphill.
“It’s Valhalla,” Angelo whispered.
“Yes, I heard,” replied Zac below his breath.
“Where dead Vikings go.”
“I can see that.”
“Thou art trespassers in this place,” boomed the one-eyed man. “In the name of Asgard I shall pierce your innards with mine axe and rend your guts asunder! Then I shall summon my wolves to feast upon your quivering innards, unless thou reveal to us who thou art.”
Zac smiled broadly. “Hi, I’m Zac. This is my... colleague, Angelo.”
Angelo poked his head out from behind Zac’s back and gave a shy wave. “Hello.”
The giant glared at them, but looked a little surprised that, despite his threats, they hadn’t made any effort to run away.
Zac fixed him with a cool glare. “And you are?”
There was a muttering then that rippled through the hall. At the far end of the table, the man’s face turned a blustery shade of red.
“Dost thou not know?” he growled.
“Nope,” Zac said. He took a step towards the table. A hundred hands reached for a hundred swords. “Should I?”
“Impudent dog!” spat a Viking who was sitting halfway along the table. He rose to his feet and slammed one fist angrily down on the tabletop.
After a moment, when he realised Zac hadn’t flinched, and that no one else was paying him the slightest bit of attention, he quietly sat down again.
“I
