A bitter rain lashed at the windows of the tall gray townhouses as they marched upwards to join the clouds that hung low above Great Russel Street, at the center of London. Oliver pulled the collar of his long grey jacket tight around his throat and wished, for the tenth time since leaving his hotel, that he had brought a wide brimmed hat with him. He tightened his grip on the slim brown valise that he held in his left hand, leaned forward into the wind, and hurried along the narrow flagstone sidewalk towards the inviting amber glow of the Royal Tavern, a corner pub located a stone’s throw from the black wrought iron gate to the Royal Museum. He leapt over the narrow side street that ran beside the pub, now more a shallow stream than a street in the torrential rain, and pushed in through the black and bronze doors of the pub.

The air within the pub was thick with the complex aroma of beeswax and stale beer, riding on an undercurrent of ancient tobacco that still seeped out of the upholstery and floorboards, though smoking within the pub had been outlawed for a decade. Oliver paused just within the door to slick the water from his red hair, wipe his face, and shake off his woolen overcoat. The pub was packed with a late afternoon mix of residents of the surrounding townhouses and museum employees recently off their shift. A few patrons spared Oliver a glance as he dripped onto the thick black doormat, but the majority ignored his intrusion and continued their conversations. The bartender waved a cheery greeting to Oliver, who returned his wave and approached the bar.

“What can I do for you?” the bartender asked.

“Pint of whatever ale you prefer, so long as it’s local,” Oliver replied. “I like trying new brews.”

The bartender eyed Oliver critically, as if the sight of an American ordering a local brew were suspicious, then said, “It’ll be hoppy.”

“The more the better.”

“Right.”

As the bartender set his attention to drawing a glass of a chocolate brown ale from a tap, Oliver turned to survey the bar. He quickly spotted the man he had come to meet, seated at a corner booth beside the front window of the pub, where he could watch the street and door with no more than a flick of his eyes up from the tablet on which was reading. 

“Five,” said the bartender, setting down a pint glass of thick ale brimming with an inch of heavy foam on the top. Oliver fished a crumpled note from his inner pocket and laid it on the bar, then lifted the glass, nodded to the bartender, and strode over to sit opposite the man he had come to meet.

“Mr. Lucas,” the man said in his thick British school accent. “I had almost hoped that you would not show.”

“That’s not nice, Sam. Besides, I texted you that I was coming before I left my hotel.”

“One can always hope for unfortunate accidents along the road, especially in such weather as this.”

Oliver shook his head bemusedly and sipped at his ale. He savored the thick, tart flavor of it, it was indeed one of the most hoppy ales he had ever tasted, and took the moment to study the man opposite.

Samuel Gower had changed little since Oliver had studied under him fifteen years past, back before his academic career had imploded with a spectacular whimper. Back then Oliver had been an enthusiastic student of ancient literature and early European languages, studying at Oxford on a semester abroad from Old Dominion University, who showed little sign of the rough and tumble man he was to become. He had enrolled in Gower’s lecture on the migration of Norse religion and blown through the course work before midterms, then begun pestering the professor for more resources to study. Then, as now, Gower had been painfully thin, dressing his gaunt frame in clothes so old fashioned that Oliver had initially thought them an ironic affectation, and possessed of an acerbic wit that that had been known to reduce pupils to tears.

“Is that the same jacket, or did you buy them in bulk twenty years ago?” Oliver said, nodding to Gower’s brown corduroy jacket, the leather elbow patches of which appeared worn down identically to when Oliver had last seem him. 

“Some of us take care of our property, Mr. Lucas. Speaking of which, pray tell, what have you stolen of late?”

Oliver smiled and raised his glass in silent salute, then took a deep drink. He set the glass back on the table, wiped his chin, and said, “I’ve got something I need you to translate for me.”

“And you think I will do it because?”

“You met me here.”

Gower scowled and lay his tablet down on the table. Oliver caught a glimpse of archaic writing scrawled across a yellowed sheet of parchment as the screen wiped to black. 

“I’ve got a folio here,” Oliver said, patting the leather valise beside him, “written in ancient German. It’s one of a kind. Recently acquired from a private collection, where it remained hidden from academic study for over a hundred years. I’ve made a rough translation, but I want your opinion on its authenticity before I go any farther.”

A sheet of lightning ripped across the sky, rattling the wide pane beside the booth. It was followed by a gust of wind that drove heavy drops of rain into the glass, briefly drowning out the noise of the crowded bar. Gower glared at Oliver through half shut eyes, as if the only reason he didn’t walk away at that moment was that the weather was just too god-awful for even his overwrought English sensibilities. Oliver felt a brief flash of guilt at using this man, who had taught him so much, but he pushed that thought away and turned his mind to the goal. It was, after all, people like Samuel Gower who had driven Oliver to seek out disreputable means of income after they had driven him out of academia. He sipped from his beer and waited for Gower to make his decision.

“How do I know you didn’t steal it?”

“You don’t, but I can promise you that if I didn’t have this it would have been stolen by someone far worse.”

“Hard to imagine,” Gower said, but his voice had taken on a distracted tone and Oliver recognized that his barbs were more automatic than heartfelt. “Let me see what you have.”

“Here?”

“Obviously. I will not bring you into the museum unless it is absolutely necessary. Many an artifact has been examined in this pub, so I doubt that whatever you have brought with you will attract attention.”

Oliver nodded and pulled the valise onto his lap, then unsnapped the worn brass buckle on the front and flipped the leather cover open. He reached inside and removed a thick bundle of yellowing vellum, sealed within a clear plastic bag, and a pair of white cotton gloves. He set the gloves atop the bag and pushed them towards Samuel. 

“Take a look at the outermost page. If you still don’t want to work with me, I’ll put the folio back in my case and be gone, but something tells me you’ll want to help.”

Gower scowled at Oliver and leaned over the table to lift the plastic wrapped folio. His eyes scanned over it and Oliver knew that he was rapidly shifting into the mindset of a skilled historical translator, searching the faded text for clues that would reveal not only its language, but the general date at which it was written and the level of education of the author. It took only a minute for Gower to finish scanning the first page before he paused and set the folio down on the table.

  “Is this genuine?”

“As far as I know. It was in a private collection for at least fifty years before the owner died and his heirs sold it to a museum.”

“Which is, I presume, where you stole it?”

Oliver smiled and lifted his glass for another sip, savoring the bitter flavor of the hoppy beer, then set the glass on the tabletop and leaned back against the wall of the booth. “Like I said, someone far more dangerous than I was trying to steal it and I rescued it before they could get their bloody hands on it.”

“This is the Wagner folio, isn’t it?”

Oliver raised his eyebrows, but didn’t blink. “I’m impressed, Sam. I didn’t think you paid much attention to news more recent than the Norman conquest. Yes, this is the folio that once belonged to Richard Wagner, you can see his handwriting in the margins of each section.”

“The reports I read stated that a deranged killer broke into the castle and stole this in the middle of a fundraising gala. He is said to have wounded one of the trust managers and killed a guard.”

“That’s about how it happened,” Oliver said, nodding gravely, “except that I took the folio, not the killer.”

“How do I know you and the killer aren’t one and the same?”

“You’ll just have to take my word on that, I’m afraid. But Sam,” Oliver paused and leaned across the table to fix Gower with a bitter glare, “I can’t believe that your opinion of me has dropped quite that low. I didn’t kill anyone. If I hadn’t taken the folio it would have been stolen by that same killer.”

Gower studied Oliver for a long while, his finger tapping at a corner of the plastic bag while his eyes searched for some lie in Oliver’s face. Finally he said, in almost a whisper, “My contacts in Germany say that the killer was shot twice in the chest from less than three meters and the castle is still closed as restoration experts work to remove blood from the murals and floors.”

“It’s true, so far as I know. There was a lot of blood.”

“You seem healthy enough.”

Oliver laughed and sat back again with a wild grin on his face. “You want me to take my shirt off, Sam? Show you that I don’t have any wounds? I’ll do it.”

Gower shook his head and pushed the folio back across the table. “Put that away. We need more space to work, and a proper environment where it won’t be destroyed if someone spills their beer on the table.”

“So I get to come in?”

“Yes, but only this once. I presume you won’t leave the folio with me?”

“You are correct.”

Gower nodded and slid out of the booth, then grabbed his tablet and tucked it into an inner pocket of his long tan overcoat before saying, “We’ll go to my lab and I will take a look at the folio. If this takes more than a couple hours you can return again tomorrow evening.”

Oliver packed the folio away in his valise and quickly finished the last half of his beer, then rose and followed Samuel out of the pub and into the lashing rain outside. They strode down the sidewalk side by side, crossed Great Russel Street four doors down from the pub, where a raised brick crosswalk peaked above the surge of water flooding down the street, and paused before a locked wrought iron gate. A female guard in a black raincoat leaned out of the gatehouse and Gower waved his identity card at her. She waved a greeting and ducked back inside to press a button on the security panel. A rugged speaker box mounted to the corner of the guard house squawked a desultory alarm and Oliver heard a heavy click reverberate through the iron gate before Gower pushed it open. They both waved back to the guard and Oliver followed Gower across the flooded flagstone yard to the west wing of the museum. 

“Still in the same office, are you?” Oliver called above the roar of the wind and rain.

“That’s right. Some of us are quite content to stay where we belong and keep our noses clean, a lesson you’d do well to learn, Mr. Lucas.”

“Bah. If we all did that your precious museum wouldn’t have half the precious artifacts of the colonized world packed away in its guts and you’d have nothing to translate.”

Oliver almost thought he saw Gower smile through the curtain of grey rain as they paused at a thick steel door set into the side of the west wing. “Perhaps there is a bit of room for the likes of you, Oliver, but I fear you might have taken more than you can chew this time.”

“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”

Gower pressed his card to the reader beside the door. The reader chirped, a green light winking on above the touch surface, and Oliver heard the solid clank of locking bolts retracting into the frame. They pushed through the door and Oliver blinked as they stepped into a long hallway with white granite walls, broken in slits above their heads by windows of thick leaded glass, and a floor of polished black stone, illuminated by the brilliant glow of LED bulbs set into the old fixtures of brass and blown glass which hung from the high ceiling. Oliver recalled that the British Museum had been one of the first public buildings in Britain to install electrical lighting throughout, after decades of being lit only by the sunlight streaming in through the high windows. Now, with the production and import of incandescent bulbs banned throughout much of America and Europe in favor of more efficient solid state diode lighting, the museum was illuminated more brilliantly than ever. They strode down the hall, past another security checkpoint, and through a heavy door crafted from a single slab of polished walnut wood. Here the stone floors were carpeted with long, intricately braided runners, which Oliver recognized as expensive Persian handiwork, despite their obvious age and wear. All about them were the signs of an institution that had been established, and through much of its history maintained, by a mighty empire that had drawn riches into itself from across the globe. Little new had been added in the last forty years, but Oliver could sense the prideful care which was showered upon the remnants of that grand past.

Gower stopped at a door of polished wood, set with a window of frosted glass, and pressed his badge against the anachronistic black metal box set into the stone of the doorframe. The lock clicked and he pushed the door open, then stepped aside to allow Oliver to enter the room first.

“Here we are,” he said, shutting the door firmly behind him. “I’ve got good lighting in here, and plenty of references.” He gestured in turn to a broad light box table standing at the center of the space, the cluttered bookshelf set against the wall to the left  of the door, and the modern workstation with a sleek flat panel computer and several racks of solid state drives to the right. 

“Not bad,” Oliver said. He shrugged out of his still damp overcoat and hung it on a coat tree beside the door, then stepped up to the work table and set his valise down.

“Our funding is not what it once was, but it suffices.”

Oliver removed the plastic bag from the valise, put on the white gloves, and extracted the folio from the bag. He lay the folio out on the worktable and switched on the overhead light. He had completed a rough translation of the text in his hotel room earlier that day, but exactly why it was valuable to Loki was still a mystery to him. The folio was written in a precise hand, the sharp geometry of the letters apparently scribed into the vellum in a faded black ink, and the language was a variant of Old German which Oliver had studied at University. For someone fluent in German, as Oliver was, grasping the surface meaning of the text was no more difficult than reading Chaucer might be for the average speaker of English, but such a reading was unlikely to bring Oliver a true understanding of the text. It would take Oliver months of painstaking research to gather sufficient knowledge of the cultural context in which the text had been written that he could truly understand the import of the text. Gower, on the other hand, had devoted his life to the study of Norse and Germanic cultures and languages. Oliver suspected that his old professor would be capable of identifying clues to the rituals that Odin sought in mere hours, rather than weeks or months. 

Gower set his tablet on the worktable, hung up his own coat, and returned to the table wearing his own pair of cotton work examination gloves. He pulled the overhead lamp closer to the table and bent down to examine the sharp lettering of the formal German script and creamy yellow of the aging vellum through the thick lens of a broad magnifying glass. 

“This appears genuine. The vellum is worn precisely as I would expect from six, perhaps seven centuries of exposure to a mild preparation of iron gall ink. Can’t tell whether it is oak or walnut, but spectrographic analysis would bear that out.” Gower looked up from the folio, as if waiting for Oliver to reply. He was, perhaps, searching for a sign that Oliver had doubted the document’s authenticity, but Oliver just nodded and waited for him to continue. He scowled, cleared his throat, and looked back to the folio, saying, “I’ll need some time. I presume you still won’t leave the document with me?”

“You would be correct in that.”

“Then take a seat and stay out of my way.”

Oliver grinned at that. He turned away from the work table and settled into an old leather wingback chair beside the bookcase. He pulled out his phone and began scrolling through the dozens of documents related to Wagner and his most famous work, the Ring Cycle, which Amber had finally forwarded from Hank that morning. 

He began with the first opera, Das Rheingold. In Hank’s succinct, and heavily commented summary, it comprised a tale of greed, magic, and lust for power, stretched out over nearly three hours of soaring orchestral music and bombastic German vocals. While the themes of the opera were familiar, and the tale of Odin’s conniving felt oddly familiar, he found nothing in it that reminded him of what he had read in the folio. 

He glanced up and saw that Gower was still bent over the work table, examining the folio through a magnifying lens. The old man’s lips moved and he furrowed his brow in concentration as he worked through the ancient text. 

Oliver looked down at his phone again, moving past Das Rheingold into Hank’s summary of Die Walküre. Recalling what the attendant had said to the drunken patron at Neuschwanstein, Oliver paid careful attention for any mention of Siegfried. He found nothing particularly useful in the first act, but he did take note of the large ash tree, into which Odin had plunged a magic sword. That, he thought, might be a clue to the ritual that Odin and Loki had performed. It wasn’t until he reached the third act of Die Walküre that Oliver came across the name of Siegfried, as the unborn son of Siegmund and Sieglinde.  

“Oh my...” Gower breathed. His magnifying lens clattered to the tabletop and Oliver glanced up in time to see him step from the table as if leaping away from a coiled viper. 

“What is it?” Oliver asked, locking his phone and slipping it into a pocket as he stood.

Gower looked to him, his face hardening into an indifferent mask, as if he had forgotten that Oliver was present in the room. He shook his head and said, blushing, “Oh, just a rather shocking passage about Norse sacrificial rites.”

“I wouldn’t think anything they did could surprise you anymore. I still remember when you made that poor girl nearly collapse with your descriptions of the sacrificial hangings, when warriors would dedicate prisoners of war to Odin by hanging them from an ash tree and impaling their still twitching bodies with a spear.”

“Of course you would remember those aspects of my lectures.”

Oliver strode over to the worktable and tried to determine what could have caused Gower such distress, but there was no way for him to tell where the old man had been reading when he cast his lens aside. Meanwhile, Gower grabbed his tablet and retreated to a padded chair at the computer desk and began tapping hurriedly at the screen. Oliver shook his head then pulled out his phone, set it down beside the folio, and started reading through the summary of the next opera in Wagner’s cycle. As soon as he saw the title of the third work, Siegfried, Oliver smiled. If the attendant at Neuschwanstein had been correct, this opera was the obvious connection between the works of Wagner and the ancient ritual to gain access to Mímir’s well among the roots of Yggdrasil.

“This truly is a magnificent piece of work, Oliver,” Gower said, rising from his desk chair. “It’s a shame you lost your way, or you might have been able to appreciate it yourself.”

Oliver bit his tongue and forced a smile, suppressing the urge to bite back at him then looked up and said, “I’m glad you can appreciate it, Sam. Why don’t you tell me what you have found, since there’s clearly more to it than some grisly pagan ritual.”

Gower grimaced and looked away from Oliver, glancing down at something on his tablet. He tapped a few times, then set the tablet on the table and said, “I’d say that this one document is worth any three in my collection for the details it provides about the use of Norse runes in rituals to worship the gods.”

Oliver nodded and tapped at the phone in his pocket. “I’ve been reading about Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and from what I can tell Wagner drew upon the details in this to create some of the most dramatic scenes in his operas.”

Samuel stepped up to Oliver, his short, round frame seemingly deflating as he did, and reached up to lay a hand on Oliver’s shoulder. He looked up at Oliver with his round, brown eyes, and said, “You need to take a step back, Mr. Lucas. You already destroyed your career by publicly espousing your radical theories, and now you seem to have been pulled into a situation with some extremely violent persons. Can you please just take my advice and step away before you destroy yourself?”

“It’s nothing I can’t handle.” 

“Are you so sure of that? Oliver, you’re treading a precarious path through a fetid morass, filled with snakes. You need to be more careful. You need to leave this with me and go home, now.” 

A sarcastic response died on Oliver’s tongue as he looked down into Gower’s ruddy face. The man he had come to know in his semester at Cambridge had been utterly fierce in his pursuit of knowledge, terrifying to undergraduates and colleagues alike as he doggedly plowed through even the most obscure texts, meticulously assembling one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the beliefs of ancient Europeans from the shattered fragments of the past. How could it be, Oliver wondered, that this man would quail in the face of uncomfortable truths? He opened his mouth to say as much, then paused, closed his mouth, and turned away from Gower to examine the folio again.

“So be it,” Gower whispered behind him. Oliver heard him begin to tap purposefully at the screen of his tablet. After a moment he set the device down again and moved to stand beside Oliver. 

Oliver didn’t look up from the folio as he said, “Like I said in the pub, I’ve got an idea what this is about, but I’m rusty on my ancient Germanic languages, so pieces of it are too dense for me.” Oliver pointed to the passage in the third section of the folio, annotated by Wagner so many years ago, which had been troubling him. “Here’s one. Wagner’s notation suggests that this passage would be useful for the opening scenes of the Götterdämmerung, which I think was his last Ring opera, but all I can make out from the folio is that it has something to do with fire.”

Gower cleared his throat, lifted his magnifying lens, and leaned forward to study the passage that Oliver had indicated. “Yes, I had noticed that on my perusal. That particular passage appears to give precise instructions for carving a set of runes into a tree and painting them with the blood of a human sacrifice. Not an uncommon practice among ancient religions, blood sacrifice, whether done to appease an angry god, break through the veil between this world and the divine or, indeed, the western notion of blood sacrifice as substitutionary atonement derive more from the mono...”

“Sam,” Oliver interjected. He tapped a gloved fingertip against the passage he had previously indicated.

“Oh, yes. As I was saying, this is a remarkably complete description of the ritual of the ash tree, which I had previously only seen referred to in the most oblique manner.”

“Any particular reason for that?”

“It’s difficult to say. Some have argued that the ritual was never written down because it was only taught to the most devoted followers of the Norse religion, individuals who would have rather died than betrayed the secrets of their faith. Others claim that they have reconstructed the steps of the ritual from a variety of old texts, but I give little credence to such claims as they generally come from individuals with a direct interest in reviving ancient religious practices.”

Oliver squinted at the black lines of text, wishing that he could decipher their meaning purely by force of will and get to the heart of this mystery. Working with Gower was beginning to stretch his patience, as he had suspected it would, but he needed the man’s greater depth of knowledge to unlock exactly why this folio had been of such great interest to both Odin and Loki. That was Oliver’s weakness, he knew. His formal education had allowed him to learn over a dozen languages, both dead and living, across much of the world, and his efforts since leaving academia had provided him with a working knowledge of the often treacherous borderlands between long discounted myth and true, but forbidden, histories of ancient powers. Oliver believed that all of this allowed him to see patterns of influence and belief that wove throughout history, and it certainly helped him to remain logical and somewhat detached when faced with long forgotten magics, but the breadth and eccentricity of his knowledge often necessitated moments like this, when he was forced to call upon experts in a specific field to aid him in comprehending the nuances of a particular culture.

“Can you provide me with a precise translation of this passage, quickly?” Oliver asked.

“That depends what you mean by precise and quick. Given a day I could probably provide you with a workable translation of the text, which might aid you in your efforts, or leave you in the dark on some obscure point of culture. A more thorough translation, with cross referenced annotations and historical commentary, might take me a week. Honestly though, this is a piece of remarkable value. One could easily devote a year or more to accurately translating the text in a culturally relevant manner, drawing on comparisons to contemporary texts, taking in to account the potential for bias since this is, after all, a fourteenth century translation of an even older text, and in...”

“Sam, I don’t need perfection. You’re not completing a new translation of the Bible here. I need to know the essentials: what the rituals entail, where they should be carried out, any obvious warnings to intruders, stuff like that. And it I need it by the end of this week.”

Samuel set down his magnifying lens and leaned his bulk against the worktable. He fixed Oliver with the same concerned gaze as before and said, “Please, just leave this be, Oliver.”

“No.”

“What if I refuse? You haven’t said anything of payment and I do have other work to do.”

“Then I’ll go elsewhere. I can think of a few other historians who would give an eye for the chance to study this.”

“You haven’t shown this to anyone else, have you?” Gower said, his eyes bulging and his throat visibly constricting. 

“You thought you were the only one?”

“Who? Dear god, Oliver, how could you be so stupid?”

“Don’t worry, Sam. Nobody else is going to publish before you.”

“Oliver, I don’t think you thoroughly grasp the importance of this situation. Please, just leave the folio with me and go back to America. I’ll find a way to settle matters with the German police and you’ll be free to continue your exploitation of archeological sites.”

“Enough Sam,” Oliver snapped. He turned away from the man and began gently folding the folio back along its original crease lines to pack it away. “I don’t need this. Mock me all you want, call my theories lunacy or lies, but do not try to get in my way. You do not know the full situation and, trust me, this is a mystery that needs to be uncovered.” He slipped the folded folio back into the plastic bag and tucked the bag away in the leather valise, then rounded on Samuel. “I’m going back to my hotel. If you want further access to this text, which you have acknowledged as remarkable, send me  a message. If not, then just forget about this whole incident and go back to remembering me as the student who failed you.”

Without waiting for Gower to respond, Oliver stalked away from the table, grabbed his jacket, and stormed out the door. He barreled past the desk guard, brushing away her surprised inquiries with a curt, “Ask Gower.” and stalked down the hallway by which he and Gower had entered the museum. He shrugged his jacket on as he walked, pulled it tight about him, and hit the panic bar of the heavy exterior door at full stride. The wind whipped in, spattering icy rain against his face as Oliver hurtled out into the cold London evening, face fixed on the ground before his feet as he muttered curses at Gower, the museum, and the whole damned institution of academia. 

He was so preoccupied that he nearly blundered into the side of a large blue panel van parked about ten meters from the door, between the museum and the wrought iron gate that stretched across the driveway. He saw the vague shadow of it in the pooled water of the drive and glanced up just in time to see a large man in a black raincoat step towards him and level a gun a his face. 

Oliver froze, his eyes fixed on the hooded face of the man with the gun. He heard the slap of a footstep on the wet stones behind him and felt a sharp prick at his neck. Then everything went dark.

Next Chapter: The Shape of Things