The Gospel of Loki Read Online Free Page B

From the mightiest warlord to the tiniest ant, he hates you all impartially. Simply by virtue of being alive and conscious, you’re already an offence to him. You can’t talk him round. You can’t par-lay . All you can do, if you’ve got any sense, is simply to keep out of his way.’
    Odin looked thoughtful. ‘And yet you came.’
    ‘Shoot me. I was curious.’
    Of course, he didn’t understand. The closest he’d ever got to Chaos was through Dream, its ephemeral sibling. And primitive people always imagine their gods to be something like themselves; at best, a kind of warlord, with a warlord’s mentality. For all his intelligence, I could tell that Odin would never understand the scale and the grandeur of Chaos – at least not until the End of the Worlds, by which time it would be too late.
    ‘I’m going to rule the Worlds,’ he said. ‘I have power, gold, runes. I have the finest warriors the Worlds have ever seen. I have the Sun and Moon. I have the wealth of the Tunnel Folk—’
    ‘Lord Surt isn’t into possessions,’ I said. ‘This is Chaos we’retalking about. Nothing has substance, or order, or rules. Nothing even keeps to the same physical Aspect. These things you care so much about – gold, weapons, women, battlements – I’ve seen them all in your dreams, and none of that means a thing to him. To Surt, it’s all just cosmic debris; flotsam and jetsam on the tide.’
    ‘Forget Lord Surt for a minute,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right. But what about you? It seems to me that someone like you could be a big hit in my camp.’
    ‘I bet they could. What’s in it for me?’
    ‘Well, freedom, to begin with. Freedom and opportunity.’
    ‘Freedom? Do me a favour. Do you think I’m not free?’
    He shook his head. ‘You think you are? When there are Worlds to discover and shape, and you have to stay in one place all the time? You’re no more than a prisoner of this Surt, whoever he is.’
    I tried to explain. ‘But Chaos is, like, the hotbed of creation. Everything else is just overspill. Who wants to live in a septic tank?’
    ‘Better a king in the gutter,’ he said, ‘than a slave in an emperor’s palace.’
    You see, that silver tongue of his was already making mischief. And then he started to talk to me of the Worlds he’d visited; of the Middle World, abode of the Folk, where already the people of Asgard were beginning to be worshipped as gods; of the Tunnel Folk of World Below, toiling to bring out gold and gems from the darkness; of the World Tree, Yggdrasil, its roots in the depths of the Underworld, its head in the clouds of Asgard; of Ice Folk; of the One Sea; of the Outlands far beyond. All ripe for conquest, Odin said; everything new and up for burning. All that could be mine, he said, or I could go back to Chaos and spend an eternity shining Surt’s shoes . . .
    ‘What do you want from me?’ I said.
    ‘I need your talents,’ said Odin. ‘The Vanir gave me their knowledge, but even runes aren’t everything. I brought thisworld out of blood and ice. I gave it rules and a purpose. Now I must protect what I’ve built, or see it slide back into anarchy. But Order cannot survive alone; its laws are too fixed; it cannot bend. Order is like ice that creeps, bringing life to a standstill. Now that we’re at peace again, Aesir and Vanir, the ice will creep back. Stagnation will come. My kingdom will fall into darkness. I cannot be seen to break my own rules. But I do need someone on my side who can break them for me when necessary.’
    ‘And what do I get in return, again?’
    He grinned and said: ‘I’ll make you a god.’
    A god .
    Well, you’ve seen the Prophecy. Odin was already tacitly taking credit for the creation of the Worlds as well as the birth of humanity. Thus:
    From the Alder and the Ash,
They fashioned the first Folk from wood.
One gave spirit; one gave speech;
One gave fire in the blood.
    Folk have a tendency to assume that the third one, the